Related quotes: Sweet one, sapphire lapwing, killdeer,...

Sweet One, Sapphire Lapwing

Sweet one, sapphire lapwing, killdeer, comet;
how haven’t I seen you in everything, casino stars,
the high fires on the mountain that bloom in the snow,
and the tangerine daylilies like the tents of the street lamps
watching the streaming serpents flow over their roots,
even the razorblades, paperclips and bicycle pumps
have signed your guestbook,
and the rose and the rose and the rose
I left for your poetry, on the grave of your soft eclipse.

You were so gentle about it; the way your words
slipped over and off the light, and your anger
that glowed like igneous subdued cherries, always
just a planet away from the darkness,
and the flaring emergency exits
that soaked the air with poppies:
you moved easily through yourself, kelp in a tide,
trailing your soft blue whips behind you
like the little threads of the stream where it meets the sea,
and something in you ends, and something else begins,
and you were grey and sad as an overcast Sunday morning
blue-greens of pagodas and pines,
and the mist that concealed your shrines.
And I realized I had to be water if I wanted to hear your voice,
and a few fireflies more, and I could see you alone in the haze
you wore like an ashen negligee, or a milky window.
Your life was all islands, and tulips clipped to butterflies,
Voices out of the dark, and the white birds that circled
the gaping mouths of your abandoned towers, like words
you’d left behind to remember the place.

And I recall thinking as I read
how much you drifted through your poems like a capsized boat,
and of all the life that goes on underneath the silver leaves,
and the things that take shelter there from the rain,
and who was in the boat when it overturned.
And I wonder who the woman was under the eyelids that felt
like big, heavy drops of rain where the stars
swam away from their pain, not fleeing
but moving off in easy schools of lantern fish.

You were a lens, a dark translucency,
but you washed things deliberately out of focus like fog
that veils everything in its water skin.
You marveled in shadows,
and there was a fire, a smudge of cedar
somewhere on a lonely beach with starfish,
a small bouquet you were trying to uphold in the wind,
and your life depended on that, that was the part
that couldn’t go out, and I think it was your heart.

And I heard the canary in the collapsed mines
trying to warn the miners to get out
but the warning always seemed to come too late;
And I began to wonder whether you
were coal on its way to diamond
or an ore with the moon inside
but it wasn’t until I stumbled across the smile of a knife
with your fingerprints all over the ivory handle
that I finally understood
that there had been a sacrifice, not a murder,
that you bled in the name of a lamb you once cherished,
and you must be young, or it would have been a goat.

Your poems were quick, impressionistic sketches
of a girl jumping from stone to stone across a creek
with an affection for her loneliness as if
all the dandelions had gone into exile.
I wasn’t quite sure what came out of the silk cocoons
you hung everywhere on the wet branches of your poetry,
sometimes I thought it was just you wrapped in blankets
and other times, dragonflies and violet fairies,
and there was hot honey in the sexual hives of your bees.

And I think I fell in love with your ghost before I did you
when I realized that every poem was the next bucket
of a waterclock that was trying to get something off its skin,
each a small pond where you renewed your virginity
by bathing in mirrors, and that was how you knew
what time it was, and where you had been,
by all the swirling faces that floated downstream.

And now, something has changed,
you open the windows wider
and let the world in, your grey blue-green lichens
are no longer the masks of the moon, and your poems don’t end
with the flags of who you are
flying at halfmast as much anymore,
though I can still hear the odd sparrow
brain itself to death with a thud against a glass sky
and I like the new depth in the guest dimensions of your seeing.
And there are stars showing up everywhere like migrant candles
in all the nebular nests of your being.

And I’ve stood here a long time now
and watched you rise shyly out of your poems
like the orange dancers in the forest who leap like flames
or the starmap of a mysterious constellation
I couldn’t identify above the hills of your body
until I saw it was the nightly journal of a blue panther
who had crept up on me in the invigilant silence from behind
as if two shadows had met in the dark like eyes and grapevines
and tangled up in each other like kites,
neither knowing where they began
or how they would end, if ever,
confessed to the webs and the wines
that they were in love with each other,
that there was lightning in the powerlines at last,
and transformers everywhere going off like landmines
and a voice in the shining, that knew, without a word,
that they were the sign of legends who woke without a past.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Deep In The Night

Deep in the night that shells its husk of blue
to pan the nuggets of its stars from a darker stream,
the heart an executioner with a fistful of pardons,
and the soft, moist, lulling of the evening air,
the threshing of slow fish,
I'm enthroned alone in a crucial palace of light
that realigns its domains to the borders of the wind,
and I don't want to feel lonely but I do,
and I don't want to miss so many, so many faces
stripped from the bough like a savaged telephone-book,
so many feathers of light drifting through the shadows of their names,
and the black granite of the uncarved bell
that turtles the blood under the eyelid of the knowing,
that makes my eyes want to scream
until the pillars of the dead sea fall like rotten salt:
how long can one road endure the passage of everything
walking life off into the stars that measure the miles in skulls?

Was I young? Were you there in the brindled moonlight?
Did I remember how to love you well; did I see with long eyes
how you rose out of the chest of the hills like a spirit leaving,
the blue effulgence of your nebulous departure
almost a cocoon of morning mist, the last breath of a lake
as if an indigo thistle released its silk to the wind
or a dandelion relinquished its ivory mane?
Were you the soul of me that lingered by gates and wharves?
Have you come back now with your bells of blood and lamps of flesh?
Can I feel again the leaves of the silver herbs
in the gardens of your fingertips?

Touch me like the breaking of a fast,
find me like a river in the night,
the dazzled theme of a wandering valley,
and pour your journey into mine like stars into a vine,
shadows running down the worn convictions of the stairs,
the midnight wines of old eclipses in the goblets of your eyes.

Once for the flame that dances on the wick of the tongue,
Once for the orchards that plead with the heart for birds,
Once for the envelope that read the letter it married,
and you, by the river, a sapphire among rocks,
tender blue grass in the translucent water-skin of the night,
loving me once as if your hands were autumns full of departure
and your eyes, the gulf of the world in your eyes, your eyes
were the soft flowing of the dark honeys
that leak from the wounded hives
we carry like knives to the grave.

Distinguished among broken clocks,
sultry and bitter, a quarantined bay of refugee stars,
caught in the threshing blades of a circular waterfall,
a mess of tents I've furloughed across the milky distances
like a chain-letter from a secret constellation to you,
I blue the intimate spaces between us with time
and patch the maps with the confluence of our lifelines
and try to restore the eyes in the sockets of our bridges
under a brow of swallows in the dusk. And I remember
all the names of the flowers, all the names of the stars,
all the badges of love that heaven and earth once offered
in lieu of the reasons why
love bares the skin of a poppy
to the teeth of the hunting sun
and then flares like a firefly
over the water-lamps of the moon,
but when it dies of its own self-inflicted wounds,
slashed by shadows among the ripe fruit of its vowels,
and the seed wasn't asked and the harvest had no choice
there are always two skies,
one bound by roots, the other, eyes,
at the back of every voice.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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At Her Door

OPEN! Open! Open!
I am here at your door outside;
The sea's blue tide flows speedily,
And ebbs a thin red tide.'
The woman rose from her warm white bed,
Threw back her hair and smiled;
The ears of scorn heard the words of love,
And the wind and the words were wild.
'Wake! Awake! Awake!
And hearken the woe outside;
The moon is hid in cloudiness;
Calleth and calleth the tide.'
The woman stood in the silence still
As a thing men carve from stone.
Her eyes burned largely in the dark,
And the smile, like a stain, stayed on.
'Listen! Listen! Listen!
Hear you the rain to-night?
A warm dark rain is falling too,
And I grow ghostly-white.'
The woman took three steps and bowed;
The smile waned from her lip;
She heard the dripping of the rain
And a soft thick other drip.
'Open! Open! Open!
I die in the dark alone.
My voice goes up in weariness
Against your heart of stone.'
The moon to a cloud-cleft stealing
Gazed down on the yearning tide;
The woman opened the streaming door
And stood in the rain outside.
Silence! Stillness! She whispers,
'Ah, Love, that death should be!'
He sighed, 'Your lips are loveliness!'
And she sobbed, 'Woe is me!'
The woman pressed his dead white face
With her face as deadly white:
The moon drew in behind a cloud,
And the tide moaned through the night.

poem by Roderic Quinn
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You, My House Of Burning Thresholds

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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And The Rose

And the rose of someone else’s dawn,
a warning to drowned sailors,
mingling in the shadows and the leaves
just beyond the bay of the window where I stand
with my last afterlife
like a star in a shoe.
And there are voyages I’ll never make
and ones I have
for the sake of the going,
for the islands and the witches, the sirens
and the green flames of the fairies
that crept out from under
the stone of my heart
like a crown of petals, eyelashes,
cool palings of fire.,
and danced for the honey and the gold
from the paper hive
softened from stone
they had made of my life in ashes.
And there’s not much difference
between a sky and a sea,
no two wardrobes ever the same,
an expanse of space and skin,
wide palms of water,
and the confluence of lifelines
the deltas and the rivers,
the arteries and veins
the lightning and the branches,
weeping on a windowpane,
the fossils of leftover tears
that winced like an eye
in the hair of the jellyfish
that washed up out of their agony
like rain. And there are fools I’ve been
that don’t remember me
and lighthouses on the moon
that didn’t heed their own advice.
But there was always something
truer in the absurdity,
a mystery or a jewel, the memory
of a face I’d never seen,
some annihilation
with a threshold of stars
I’d never crossed, a whisper
of light, a fragrance, a voice
singing to itself in a lonely place
that put my caution to shame.
And it’s been my life to go,
to cross, to enter, to know
the lostness as my own,
and the darkness and the solitude
where I begin and end
like water taken from the river
and the river returned
as the moorings of the emptiness
I took for a boat
like a face
between the pages of my hands,
and all in the name of some nightbird
some shadow of a wing
that covered my heart
with such a quick eclipse
that no one even noticed I was gone.
Poetry, love, life; the shore is one thing
but the sea another,
and it’s not that I was brave
or thought I could walk on water
or had a secret starmap,
wiser than the rest;
I looked into the abyss with a shudder,
as if I had to kiss
a cobra on the head
or enter a spider’s womb
without being caught,
for the terrible acceptance
of what I sought
beyond the starless gates
and moth warnings
of the usual taboos. Every terror
scales a treasure, and the dragon
masks its secret,
not meant for the circumspect,
in risk. The sane prefer heaven
but heaven isn’t for the sane
who don’t know how to die enough
to answer the sphinxes and grails.
And it’s made me
a heretic of the heart,
a rogue star, a poet,
to live this way,
drinking the black wine
that was offered me
from the skulls
that lined the mouth
of the mysterious death
in the doorway
of every true entrance.
And it’s not the lies
that kill you,
nor the truths,
or looking through
a hole in the fence
at things you were never meant to see,
the medusa making love
to an apple-tree,
or Isis naked behind her veils
that no one’s ever lifted;
it’s returning
the way you came
from the wells
of the transformations,
the mountains of the muses,
the islands and the trees
of seduction and death,
unchanged, your tears still tears
not jewels of the blood,
and your voice,
not the fire of poison-tipped spears.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Small, Warm Birds

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Dark writing....

Dark shadows sneak under the door
As I keep writing these dark lyrics more
Of a nature that's not evil or unkind
Rather of disturbing thoughts in my mind.

They say for everything bad it's found
Something good it has to come around
The weather wouldn't be pleasant if wasn't for the rain
These feelings wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the pain.

I'm doing a storm in a cup of water to prepare
Meanwhile around people don't even care
I pray for my life to not end before these stanzas
But mindlessly I write and write looking for the answers.

My cold dark poems are everywhere
Floating around in the midnight air
Listen, closely you have no choice
These dark words, my deep voice.

Where the world is falling apart,
There lies a dark poem of the heart
Dark poems tell the darkest lines
They make you hear their shrieking cries.

Hold dearly onto your ravaged soul;
Don't find you've let life take its toll
Youll find my dark poems are everywhere
Read them, like them, if you dare….

I am the shadow hiding in the dark
The evil sounds that wake you in the night
I'm a shadow lurking in the dark
Because still it always feels so right

So I write my shadowy poems line by line
But I'm constantly over looked
My brain is fried down to the spine
And my broken heart is cooked

I'm left only with part of a heart
That will never again beat
I'm the one person
No one has to meet

I am a shadow lurking in the dark
Writing my poems so deep
Whispering my words so stark
Pray your soul to keep…

poem by Deep Dark Soul Poet
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Poetry

Poetry isn’t a talking fly
on a one way street in a lightning storm; isn’t the orchid
that issued from the sword in the snakepit
that penned whatever it saw in stone. What does this mean?
Forty-one years of trying to push
the singularity of the universe
through the eye of a needle as large as the reasons why
without twisting the thread of the original theme,
without shrinking the sky to an umbrella
in a glass skull freaked with insistent translucencies.
Poetry isn’t breast-fed by a doting Medusa
who will excuse your wailing with a pat on the back
as you try to configure your verbal relations; it’s not until
the lantern’s overturned and all the stars and fireflies go out
and your mouth is stitched shut like a wound
that will never heal, and the flowers latch their honey-gates
in a surprise eclipse, and even the worm is a lonely comet
in the eye of the rose that called for your annihilation,
that the wonder of having nothing to say for no reason
begins to gather like light in the wishbone of a harp
and sings to amuse the silence
with the posthumous profundities of its own retraction
like a dropp of water crying down a mirror
that didn’t know it cared. Free yourself
of what you think you have to say about anything
to hear the urgent fountain-mouths of eyeless dawns
that write with the beaks of frenzied birds
that have absorbed the night like ink. Live
on the underside of the leaves that never fall
from the unpruned tree on the moon
if you want to know the nightmare of the spider
webbed to the morning like a poem
between two blades of stargrass.
There’s a storm with a candle in it
that isn’t a leftover star, more powerful
than the black-outs of the lightning
that seizes the heart like a hawk
and slashs it open,
a love-letter to the world with a knife,
to see what’s truly phrases your blood to the moon.
Do you understand, do you truly understand;
there’s a firefly in the grave,
a soft, shy light like the glow of a distant city
pearled on a blind horizon, a black mirror
that absorbs the faces it reflects like death,
so much brighter than the white hole
of all that you’ve been saying
that even the stars are maggots of light,
commas in the wake of summer swans,
compared to the oceanic radiance of that shining.
Drown your paper lifeboats in that,
add your grief like a river to the nightsea
you’ve been walking on like a messiah with a map,
and let go of yourself like an apple from a bough.
Do you see the blossoms of the orchard
swept up in the gutters of the busy world
working hard at its own extinction; those
are the withered eyelids of poems,
the useless sails of spineless foolscap
lined with blue horizons
that asked you where you were going
and because you answered like a compass
left you breathless at the equator, junk-mail
on the doorstep. The world has been discovered,
the metal capitals starred like jewels;
the real estate offices crammed with valleys and lakes.
Sink like a continent that can’t be colonized
and show me the thresholds you’ve sloughed like skin,
the footprints of your transformations
where you jumped from the tree
that swung you like a bell
and walked away deranged
by the solitude of your dangerous humanity.
Look for a door with a broken hinge and enter.
Stop carving your name on your bones
like the prows of old shipwrecks, dismiss that harem
of painted figurines you’ve bound
to the mast of your bow like a pen
and learn what it really means
to be destroyed by a living muse,
to hear the sirens singing you to death.
There’s a ram and an altar on the world mountain
waiting for you to drag yourself up there
like an avalanche of dead meteors
and plunge the last crescent of the blood-crazed moon
through your heart like a sacrifice
in the name of nothing at all
if you want to true the wind
to the womb of your ghostly poems
with embryonic whispers of “I am. I am. I am.”

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Practical Uses Of Poetry

Not to be practical, not
to mean, be, do,
no more than the wind
to insist upon itself, to
move like the wind,
like a disembodied intelligence
over the mindfields
practicing the twin disciplines
of light and rain,
scattering the mystic pollen
of intuitive seeds
that bloom like roseate fire
in the shadowless gardens of the abyss
arranging the cosmos like a wild bouquet
in the blood vase of the human heart.
To remind us
we're not fireflies or stars
stuck on a chromosome
of intellectual flypaper,
a buzzing that will stop,
but a passion of native iron
in the arms of alien oxygen,
urged into creative consummation
by carbon.
Free as water, free as God
the night she put the universe on
like make-up
to attend to the beginning of everything
with a cosmic efflorescence of fireworks,
to speak for the stones, the stars, the trees,
to say them into being,
to say us, to whisper us
into the enormity of her solitude,
the inconceivability of her darkness,
a secret she couldn't keep anymore.
Experience is a child playing,
not function, not a job, not a career.
What's practical about singing alone
because the mysterious nightbird
has come like a blossom of joy
to the bough of the tree in winter?
Or must dancing have a use,
music be enchained to the stone ear of utility?
Bleeding isn't very practical either
but how would you ever know
you were a rose scarred by your own thorns
if you didn't?
Sooner renounce the sweetness
of the star-flavoured summer night air
or teach the wind a compass and a map,
the sky to consult a control tower
than try to grind the stars of poetry
with a stone and an ox
into a function and a fee.
The wages of poetry are always a gift
that takes the recipient by surprise
with the beauty of its subtlety
and a coin as true as the moon.
Who asks to be paid
to dance alone with God?
And even the abyss
has provided you with a world
like a passport to anywhere you want to go.
Among the birds and the leaves
flowing along with this pilgrimage of stars
to shrines that are older than knowing,
if the sun or the moon
should open your voice like a flower
in the deep woods
to hear you singing in the light,
and you are urged into poetry
through a gate as open as the cosmos,
and you discover colours have echoes
and the notes of your song
are a palette of gardens,
and everything you paint with your picture-music
is the portrait of someone you're becoming
until you look like everyone
from the inside out,
every passion
the longing of a planet
to burn with life,
and the deepest watershed of your humanity
is itself
the fountain
where the goddess drinks from her own reflection,
and you understand
that the word in the morning
is the word at the end of the day,
and that the life that adorns your body within
is the wine of the worlds
in a cup of clay
encrusted with stars
and you are the delirium the dream seeks,
the lightning and lucidity of the dark sage
your roots consult like a storm,
would you then look upon the first crescent of the moon
and try to fix it to a plough,
would you look forever
into the wells of now
like the eyes of a lover
who combs out the tresses of the willow like the wind
as if he played the whole of the night
on the blue guitar of your heart,
would you renounce the music as impractical?
To walk through this world aware,
with a spear of moonlight through your heart
like a poet, to feel
everything a human can feel
and have the courage and the art
to sing
the joys and sorrows,
the gardens and intimate hells alike
with compassion and understanding,
even when you often don't understand
because the shadow of the world
eclipses your eyes,
or the windows are saturated with pain,
to be able to do that, to be that
is beyond assessing
because there is no intention to life
or the running of the river
or the unspooling of a poem
that conceives of its seeing as progress.
What the eye writes
on these pages of percipient sky
that bring the world to a focus in us
is not a reality in advance
of the dream that shadows it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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There's Nothing Cozy About Real Beauty

There’s nothing cozy about real beauty.
That’s why it scares you to death
when you’re around it. You sense
that it disdains to kill you
simply because it knows it can
but that only makes you beg for the knife
even more, even deeper, until
you’ve suffered more death
than you ever knew there was to suffer.
It’s the same with the truth. The truth
isn’t the act of a well-meaning
coffee-table sentiment,
a hundred dollar book
of recycled paper
to help save the Caribou,
an a chequered impressionist table-cloth
with compositionally balanced butter-knives
that have never tasted blood in their lives.
If you can’t hear the shriek
of the red-tailed hawk as it plunges
toward a mating pair of killdeer
executing an aerial ballet in May
that would make you cry it’s so beautiful,
you can’t hear the hummingbirds
at the holly hocks either
even if you know sign language.
And no more than the truth, poetry
isn’t a mirror you hold up to nature
with preconceived notions of what
you want to see reflected there.
In hunting season around here
the truth can bleed Bambi upside down
from the bough of a willow
that let’s its golden tresses down
all the way to the ground
until its tips are dyed in blood.
The truth can tear the heart of a wolf out
and eat it raw in front
of a classroom of schoolchildren
while it’s still beating.
Go ask any child army.
Go ask any street kid in Ottawa
or any bushwhacked adolescent in Lanark.
You asked me to read your poems
without holding anything back from you
and I have and I won’t.
You keep a tidy house
on the right side of the tracks
of a zodiac with astro-turf lawns.
And I see all your candles
have been dipped in scented wax
and write right-handed
with glowing nibs on the reverent air
and there’s a stick of sandalwood incense
protruding from a buddha’s belly-button
that makes me wonder
whether he’s committing hiri kiri
or lowering his lance at a joust
to let a lady tie a ribbon to it
as you have most of these poems
to designate them your champions.
You’ve bomb-proofed your church so well
with so many lesser lights
in cages and black outs there’s no chance
you’ll ever be struck by a bolt of inspiration.
The lightning doesn’t send messages
like sweetgrass in the beaks of doves.
You sip from the muses like bottled water
from the tears of crystal skulls.
But you haven’t yet learned how
to swallow their watersheds on the moon
or drink blood from the skull of your own
in a single gulp for fear
they’ve been contaminated by fracking.
Flying fish in a sea of shadows
that’s always at full tide
but you never reveal
the constellations of dead starfish
that reek to high heaven
like the stink of enlightenment on the bottom
when the tide bleeds out
like a white-tailed doe.
Happy lifeboats moored safely in port
as if there were nothing to risk or rescue
but a new paint job
as a storm front moves in
like a curtain call of judgmental grey.
All your feral cats have been fixed
and the darkness has no claws or fangs,
and that wilderness that used to howl
in an agony of sex and longing
under your windowsill of potted herbs
all unnerving night long
now purrs impotently in your lap.
You strew your path with rose-petals
but when have you ever walked barefoot
on toxic thorns or the plinths and eyelashes
of the splintered chandeliers of the stars?
You cut the polar ice-caps off
the extremes of a hard-boiled planet
and only eat the temperate zones
you can scoop out with a silver spoon
like the front left parietal lobe
of Humpty Dumpty’s sunny brain.
Blackholes do more to enhance
the radiance of stars and fireflies,
ignite the fire of dragons
on the other side of a wormhole hourglass
into the next coincidence
of a harmoniously contradictory world
than all those sunbeams
you try to keep on
like night lights in a morgue
because you’re afraid to sleep with the dead
and they don’t want to wake up without you.
And I’m not saying
you need to go out and mess up,
trample on your own garden,
turn Taurus loose
in the china shop of the Pleiades.
No one can go out and think their way
into an experience they haven’t had yet.
They merely experience their own thought.
Just another poetry book
having sex with itself
in the hopes of winning an award
to make it feel fulfilled enough
it can take what’s real for granted.
But even Rimbaud who
dissociated his sensibilities rationally
and then killed a man with a stone
on a construction site in Cyprus
discovered how dangerous it is
to broach the spontaneous deliberately.
As for me, I’ve learned
to delight in the despair
of my own crazy wisdom.
As for you, you might start
by turning the light and around
and looking into the darkness within you
not as a smudge on the reputation of your lilies
but as a chunk of coal
that didn’t let your diamonds down.
A suggestion I suggest you ignore
if you’ve understood anything I’ve said
about the nature of poetry
that makes any petty sense at all to you.
And the next time you
you run into your own clarity
like Galileo trying to show you
through his telescope
there are sunspots in your field of view
like bruises on a banana
and the moon is pock-marked
by one too many facelifts,
don’t try to paint the lens
as if you were airbrushing
the imperfections out of your own eyes
just realize how important it is
to open them from the inside out.
And as for those little black ants,
that keep inciting a riot of words
you’ve got no crowd control over
you keep setting honey-traps for,
to keep them from running all over
the planetary orb
of your moonlit peony in bud
like a chaos of minutes
looking for a fixed place
on a spherical waterclock
as if they were all
running out on time simultaneously.
Trust me, or don’t, they’ll let you know
when the sun shines at midnight
and your hour’s come round to bloom.
Meteors cry like diamonds
for the species they make a big impact upon.
And volcanoes eventually
weep their way into islands
that will be seeded by birds and castaways.
The eye of the rose
looks into the secret heart of the worm
and sees the wings of tearful loveletters
being born like butterflies in the rain.
And then the sun appears
and dries them out
like laundry on the line.
Or the negative of an eclipse
hung up in a dark room
like a flypaper map of the stars
in an alternative universe
on the other side of your eyes
that hasn’t come up with a name,
a fixed place, or a myth of origins for you yet
until you’ve passed
like the tiny planet of a firefly
through the gravitational eyes
of a constellation of black holes
without going out
like a flashlight you keep shining
nervously into the dark doorway
of a dragon’s mouth when you write
to see what was making the noise
like the universal cosmic hiss
of a flamethrower in a snakepit
of oracular wavelengths
that keeps you from going
downstairs to find out.
As a Zen master once said.
The stone is lustrous
but there’s nothing inside.
The ore is different
but from it comes gold.
And as any poet knows
who’s ever been inspired
you polish gold in fire.
You don’t write white noise
to block the darkness out
as if you were afraid
of things that go bump in the night.
Don’t fall like a snowflake on a furnace
then try to sip your tears like spit
from its prophetic mouth when you melt.
Be a star, be a Chinese lantern,
be a fire-kite of burning insight.
Light upon light means
the darkness shines as well
on the inside as it does without
whether you see it or not.
The moonrise of an emotion
follows the sunset of a thought.
Two tides of the same ocean,
the highs and the lows
the crest and the trough
of the same wavelength we’re all on.
And the mountain you’re trying to climb
is only as high and white
as the valley is deep and dark.
Not two is the furthest thing
you can say in a universe that isn’t a lie.
There’s a lot of shadowless noon
in your impeccable poetry
but where’s the starless midnight
on the other side of of your eyes?
Don’t orphan your first born
to legitimize your poems
like a forged birth certificate
you hope everyone will recognize
as your rightful place
in a table of contents
with the good taste of a menu.
A suggestion I suggest you ignore
if you’ve understood,
deeply understood
anything I’ve said
about the nature of poetry
that makes any petty sense at all to you.
And I don’t say this to be kind or cruel.
You know how
to harvest the full moon
like a sparrow
the gleanings of the light,
twelve grain whole wheat bread,
but you don’t know how to sow stars
on the dark side of an eclipse
that will sprout and bloom,
a phoenix feathered in wild fire
that will catch on and spread
like life itself
like the syntaretic spark
of the timeless with the fruitless dead.
Out of the dark abundance
of watersheds and roots,
the phoenix energy of your cells,
the bright vacancy of the full moon,
a blossom on a dead branch,
the new moon of a crow in autumn
on a green bough of night birds
that are never at a loss for words
when the truth and the beauty
of the light coming out of the darkness
leaves them as speechless
as a starmap of fireflies
where the constellations have no names,
going up in flames.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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She Takes Away My Sorrow

Upon the mossy grass she lays
Dreaming like the sun
We see the butterflies on the meadow
Hear the crickets by the woods
Evening brings magenta with violet
The moon basks like a lover
Leaves sigh in the soft breeze
Now the stars shine with fate

Without your love I fade into the strange
The Milky Way smiles like a warm world
A campfire glows like paradise
The coals of love burning like my heart
Pine trees are mystical witnesses
We sit on an old log holding hands
Darling can you hear the elves laugh?
Voices like candles of angels

By the river time is a gentle rose
Life is my friend not my foe
Rain has left the summer vibrant
Green radiance amidst the blue heaven
Her eyes bring me assurance
Her touch tender as sweet hope
The moment blossoms like a flower
Her kiss like a moon on fire
She takes away my sorrow

poem by Joseph Narusiewicz
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Things Might Be Drifting Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Love Goes Everywhere

Love goes everywhere, a blue nightwind
blowing the stars off the sills of far horizons,
making breasts of the heaving waves,
corrugated ripples, undulant mirrors
on the snake-scrawl skin of the shuddering lake,
kicking through the leaves of the heart
still not satisfied with its last draft of autumn,
arsenic on the tongues of the green dancers in the fire,
and twilights dripping like paint from the lips of vandalized roses.

Seabirds veer into its flesh like drunk swords
and there are cherries in its teeth that bleed,
and huge iron bells that come down like the pillars of dinosaurs
walking their funerals through a nuclear winter too late,
and doors off their hinges with their mouths gaping
at the swallows that come and go trying to paste
their clay and thread, a thatch of matted feathers
into a homely heart, a begging bowl of naked birds.

And the vases of love that are curved like the hips of a woman
Are as often, the fumaroles of spewing volcanoes,
bouquets of smoke and meteors, igneous ejaculations
refleshing themselves in sulphurous ores of glowing magma,
and the candles standing naked like studio models
in the ebb-tide sheets of their languid wax, and wine
on the palette of the sunset matador
who was gored on the horns of the moon,
starfish in the morning death carts of creaking Calcutta.

Up here on the wooden fire-escape, a look-out above
the begging crowns of the trees, and a solitary willow
easier than lips, waiting to rinse her hair in the rain
as if she had sisters, unravelled scars of snared lightning
off in the distance, the shock of electric bats
in the roseate boudoirs of the clouds, and the moon,
hauling its boat up the opposite bank of the Milky Way
to ferry its ghosts across the last abyss before morning,
and the stars ablaze in the flammable radiance of your eyes,
and the fire-iris in the blue of mine, I think of you, us,
and the miles between us in our continental bed
with its coverlet of cities, trains, highways, forests,
and the stains of deep-eyed lakes, plains and mountains,
the landscape of your body under sheets of autumn grain,
gathering prairie storms for a pillow, tornadoes for springs,
and our passion the conflagration of tens of thousands of acres,
the slipping of faults and cracks, the chafing of terraform plates
that shake the earth with apocalyptic ecstasy
and multiple aftershocks, love at the epicenter,
and the turmoil of crazy winds that sigh us away like grass,
and I marvel that in the tiniest house of time,
a breath within a breath, a berry in the sun,
as far as the silence away from each other,
we should live like a thriving planet,
each in the bridal coasts of the other’s arms.

And I want to nudge you with secrets,
whisper eels into your oyster ears,
gather up the mushrooms of your lips,
the soft moss of your sex
and wheel higher than a hawk
on a stairwell of semen and honey
then down the dizzy bannisters of your helical body
into the moist cellars of your rarest wines,
where the ghosts mingle in the fluids of life,
shapes of the watershed, longing for mangers.

And then I remember the rain in a likeness of you,
soft cameos of waterlilies that glow
like islands among black swans,
and the violet hyacinths that reed
the oboes of the dragonflies,
and the wild mink of stolen caresses
that nip your fingertips with the fangs of the moon,
and the terrible distances between your toes and your eyelids
a man walking on his lips
would take years to caress
and how many rivers I’d have to cross
before I came to the jewel in the root,
the fire-well and seed-lake of your tears.

And then the rain comes down harder,
heavy drops of ripe sorrow driving me back to myself,
smearing my clothes over my skin like wet, black leaves
and I sit for an hour, an ark on a mountain top in the legends of the flood,
all my dark abundance released on the bestial floor of the earth,
and an emptiness closer than death
bleeds me out into a vast space under a black sun
where the shadows of time are scattered like ashes
and all the trees in a dream are palatial pillars of salt
because I think of you laughing like a lamp in the rain,
your hair streaming skirts of beaded water
as both of us run into the same heart for shelter
and I find a clean towel to tamp your river face
and the cheeks and eyelids of the blossoms that fall upon it
and just when I’m done and go to give you a kiss, you’re gone
and there’s only these hot, glass blisters of grief to live on and on and on
believing in a day, a month, an era, a year, a moment ago
when I wake up in a doorway of bone, and you, in the flesh, appear.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Temptations of The Night

Looking at the stars at night I feel small
The darkness wraps my body like a shawl
Through the pale light from the moon above
I see silhouettes of things only dreamed of
Grey and black shadows bear new life and meaning
While the voices born at nightfall are intervening

A dark leaf falling to the ground really slowly
Becomes a mysterious object foreign and unholy
Thoughts of times past mystic dances under a pale moon
I like to surrender to that and stay with nature attune
Water lilies gracefully accompany me on a nightly swim
While creatures of the night dance around my love to win

Tall grass on the waterside looks like prophets of doom
Inviting me for a quick chat to a beautiful marble tomb
I'm thinking of fireflies that could save me tonight
But instead I fall in love with a beautiful black knight
The night holds promises mesmerizing and waiting
Becoming one with the shadows luring creatures are mating

Cries into the dark echo and become nights temptations
Dark muddy waters disclose confessions in consultations
Dragonflies like lovers sing to the tunes of a silent silver light
While the darkness protects me and keeps me out of sight
My eyes linger before the night gives in to a new day
Bathing in the moonlight touching the silver crystal display

poem by Kristina Louisa Carr
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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A New Time Was Born

I approached you
And the flash light
Of your voice embraced me.
It was somewhere, near the divine idea.

I hadn't met you before, but
When we united our voices
To be together in this way,
I felt the eternity floating in the air,
That kind of white eternity
In which, everyone wants to stay.

So many people crowded in between us
That we seemed to be two points on a world map.
So long was the distance in between us
That we seemed to live

One at the North Pole
And the other one at the South Pole.

It was the time when
The sun was declining beneath the blue horizon
In a ring of fire
And the moon was rising in the same sky,
And the coming night was embracing
The leaving day.
It was our twilight.

It was the time when
The stars began to
Appear on a new dark sky.
I began to be afraid of losing you.

I took the elapsed seconds
To hang them on the 'Lyre' constellation.
The existent seconds flowed into there
With a terrible rapidity,
Letting those, which were new to come to life.
A new time was born,
In which, we became existent one for each other.

I felt that you wanted to touch me.

I heard a tenderness in your voice.
Our feelings flowed into
The 'Bird of Paradise' constellation.

Suddenly, a rain of stars began to fall down.
I didn't know if it was a real rain of stars
Or a firework, I didn't know
Whether we could really embrace each other,

But I felt
That I was irreversibly transformed
Into another new woman.

poem by Marieta Maglas
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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The Day An Empty Envelope

The day an empty envelope, the clouds
islands of their own in a slow wind,
gathering out of nothing, going anywhere
the blue conception of the dispersing sky urges
above the green, summer turmoil of the trees.
I wake up wondering if love is just a word
or a whisper of smoke from distant mountains
or a tuberous begonia someone tore up last night
in their madness to dramatize their exit out of ecstasy,
their roses, scalded lobsters, their heart
torn like a soggy dawn in the pincers of the moon.

And I have been here before at the end
of these long wharves pillared in departure,
standing firmly fixed in the tides of sorrow,
saying goodbye to the sky and the sea
that have cried enough stars for the night
to remember its light is the taste of oblivion.
The air breathes you in like an anchor of mist
and all the words we released like vows
gently unhooking their wings from the fishing nets
we found abandoned in the wake of a lunar desert
that had wandered off like an arsonist in the archives of its tears,
are pens that have flooded in our pockets of blood like oilslicks,
not the feather of song left that could fly.

And I should thank you for the bouquet of corals
you gave me like an island in a ocean of ashes,
and the nights my heart was a frenzy of mating eels
thrashing the silver waves in a ferocity of transcendence,
a rabble of moonlit tongues, that made me feel
the hanged man was at last a key someone would risk,
a boat moored to the wind that had at last found a door
with the eye of a water-lock and the Gulf Stream
of an infinite threshold it would take a galaxy to cross,
and there were voyages I dreamed, o, I dreamed
of naming continents after you, oceans on the moon
that teemed with startling new forms of luminous life
that did not salivate for each other like arrows on a food chain
but fell from the intensity of our wishing like rain.

I wanted to add your fire to mine on a pyre of thorns
and mounting the last constellation uttered in bliss
by the mouth of a burning rose immolated in her own beauty
rise like a kite trailing a thread of blood to show the stars
how to weave a life that breathes like silk
out of the mulberry cocoons of their nebular cradles,
auroras exhaled like the veils and ghosts of riverine light
that disclose the grace of a woman, secret by secret,
until even the stars are homeless gestures of ash,
crowns of flame enthroned in the abysmal domains
of the radiant mystery they could draw from
like water from the wells of your eyes
to refute the claws of time and space with flowers.

And it's been four starless nights, four bleached days
since I last heard from you, no word, no sail, no wick,
no eyelid of a candle to open the darkness like a dream,
not a chromosome in a fortune-cookie to dispell my fate,
only the incremental atrocity of the cruel silence that salts the garden
with the radioactive fall-out of your nuclear absence
so that even my shadow glows like a sunspot that won't wash off.

And I must tell myself you're not the queen caprice
of a cherry in a hive of chocolate leaking honey
all over the sticky page of a theatrical candy-wrapper
blowing up the road like the obsolete playbill of a cliche
well attended by the ants who traffic in sugar.
I must tell myself over and over again like a wheel,
not to save myself like an enlightened pagoda
in a corner of the cones of the fools who wear
their disasters like the paper headlines of a daily heart,
not to adorn death with the lies of wounded heroes,
for I am a small planet of haunted wines
you can burst against the roof of your mouth like a grape,
and far too acquainted with eclipses and cremations
to exalt my ashes with the consolations of a reviving phoenix,
tell myself not to lawyer my sorrow with a congress of crows,
and in a crowd of placards and protesters, pretend that I am brave,
that my cause is just, that the world you've left me needs to be saved;
or that I can save it from myself like an arsonist
by learning how to swallow it like fire,
not to incriminate you among the cap-gun terrorists
who rage like chains in the doorways of their emergency exits,
their hearts boiling hand-picked scorpions like blackberries
to mitigate the acids of their glass wounds,
but to believe you're still out there somewhere like a road
that has wandered off in a wilderness of directions,
though the mountains and trees all point the stars out to you,
that cannot conceive of where it leads until we both walk it.

I want to believe there's no bodycount
behind the words of love you send me like refugees
that gather in the valleys of my heart like liberated fireflies,
that the lampshades of your poems are not wrapped in human skin
with a star pricked out by fangs and the repeating decimal
of a genocidal number too powerless to stop itself
from biting at the running sore of its own ulcerations.

I have never seen your face, heard your voice,
the wind more intimate with your skin than my longing,
but I have felt the stars within brighten in your presence
when all I could be to you over the miles, lives, the worn shoes,
was someone who charged space with gusts of ionic affinities,
hoping somehow the atoms knew, the rain, the hill in the fog
calling out to the drifting lifeboat with a disembodied voice
that there was yet a breath within a breath, a light within the light,
what I was before I was born to reach out empty-handed like this
to create you out of the nothing I am, a marvel more than me,
a clear fire that burns invisibly like breath on a windowpane,
the exhalation of a ghost startled by a spirit that lives
within and beyond it in a continuum of vital strangers,
closer to us than the patches on the underside of our eyelids.

I don't know what I am to you; though I have hoped
and you have said things to me I could only disappoint,
but they have made me want to drink your face from my bare hands,
they have made me a fountain and a vine, a door that bleeds
among the quicksand foundation-stones waiting out the mountain,
and my heart was a pauper lavish with revelation, a glove
that felt the universe fit it like your hand, and the answers,
were as evident as birds gathering seeds in an open furrow.

We have grown over the months like the rain together
and maybe now we fall, maybe now this alloy of water
is to be threshed by the wind like wild rice
shaken into a birchbark prow of aboriginal moonlight,
and the waterlilies have finished blooming like asterisks
and the stirling is marred by the acids of black fingerprints,
and a patina of commonality makes the moon a cold stone,
but there's a pause between accountable heartbeats,
a world between waking and dreaming, exits and entrances,
where I think everything returns without having left
like stars paled in the blazing of a lesser light that thrives,
and the heart receives itself back into its own hands like a ball,
and even in the rain-soaked journals of the autumn leaves,
the wind still addresses the flowers with its inconstancy,
and hands still find each other across the dangerous table
like the lost receiving the lost in a place of belonging
that is a stranger to them both on the same side of the river.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Night Of Peace

NIGHT OF PEACE

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

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

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

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

PATRICK WHITE

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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En.Citatepedia^®.ro

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