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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Related quotes
When I'm Alone
When I'm alone
I want to be with someone,
and when I am with someone,
I'm twice as alone.
My unhappiness
is a snake-pit
I dangle my heart over
like a mouse by the tail
and when joy does show up,
a butterfly with resplendent wings,
it slowly adapts its palette
to the slag and soot and oilslicks
of the black orchard
shedding its petals everywhere
like micro-eclipses in hell.
And all the poems
I gathered like asters
from the autumn starfields,
all these skies that opened above me
as I walked down a long road alone
in darkness and light,
obedient to the wind and the shadows
that whispered move on, move on
beyond the journey and the arrival,
are merely a leaf,
a tattoo on the back
of a serpent of water
sliding downstream
like rain like mind in search of a course
that isn't the cracked map
of last year's desiccated creek bed.
My body is scarred, my heart
a voodoo doll
pierced by a thousand fangs
as it burns like a bee
in a rose of heretical fire
for refusing to turn my honey into venom
or conform to any magic but its own.
And there is no heaven
to appeal to as a last resort.
I endure what I endure
for the dignity
of my indefensible humanity,
knowing the pain
that sometimes turns my nerves
into stand-ins for the lightning
that keeps crackling my cosmic egg
like the paint of my last masterpiece,
also schools my blood like the wine
I pour out joyously
into the empty goblet of the mystery
whenever I host the moon.
Life is neither fair nor unfair
and the seeing, a vision, a poem
is always a bird
born and breaking free of your eyes
opening like a threshold
like a flower
like a crack of lightning,
like the world that hangs,
a veil of water,
from the ends of your eyelashes now.
Love is great, love is much, maybe all,
and the being here incomparable,
and the mystery always
whispering in a field beyond its own compass,
and the wind that tastes of birds,
and the light that tastes of flowers,
and the fountains of darkness
where God washes the stars off her face,
will always urge the extinguished branch
of an astonished pen
to blossom into a poet.
Are the dead any less creative
than the living?
If they don't come from anywhere
how can you ask where they go?
If everything is the unborn energy
of a dancing god
with worlds in her blood
how can even a blade of grass perish?
This world, this life,
this ungraspable now of awareness
is the passion of a goddess, not a passing thought.
Beyond this riot of blessing and anathema,
this racket of loss and acquisition,
of birth and murder,
there is a silence
deeper than the space
between breaths,
an abyss without longing
that knows you from within
as the fire knows the flame,
or a woman,
the haste of her lover.
If you think you know something,
cast the thought down
as you would a venomous serpent
or let it strike;
even the poisons
can unspool you like wine
in this delirium of life.
And isn't it more than could have been asked for
just to be here
under a sky
spun finer than the silk of diamonds,
breathing the stars in and out
like trees?
I have been silently and eloquently
stupefied by the wonder
all my life;
and urgently moved to explore
the great ocean of awareness
that intrigued me to experience myself
as the world,
I put to sea with a leaf for a sail.
We must become
more intimate with our vastness, learn
to listen to the whisper
that has always been us
in our own depths.
We have depleted our preludes of awe,
the spirit slags in the pit mines
of our complacent arrogance.
Our own creations
amaze and lull us away
from the sustaining abundance
of what was given spontaneously.
What do we know?
Why water?
Why stars?
Who is it that asks the question?
The fluid continuum of the mystery
is a waterclock
and every receptacle, an era.
And science can advance the shadows of life,
but the answers eventually fall like leaves
and no one knows how to account
for the stars that root in the duff.
What each of us sees
when we see deeper than blood
over the course of a lifetime
are the eyes of the goddess
when she looks at us.
What we are is our own creation,
curse and blessing alike.
You created heaven.
You created hell.
Experience is just the metal
shaped on the anvil of our hearts
into edges that kill like life,
the plough drawn from the stone,
not the sword,
or blades behind the door
that wound like serpents.
You can enlighten or eclipse
the iron in the ore
by pouring it
into a heart or a bullet.
You can make a nail
and build a house
or crucify a teacher.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Said Softly
Something said softly in the night
like a tendril on a windowsill
tasting the moon, a whisper, a word
that walked in the light without
abandoning its shadow,
a phrase with wet wings
dreaming itself out of its chrysalis
not knowing whether it's a leaf or a dragonfly
until the whole tree wakes up beside it,
something sought but rarely said
saturated with the meaningless life of meaning
that could touch space like flesh
and make it feel the thrill of new eyes
running down its arm like tears.
And it's not that I want
to unsay the night or God
to define myself as a human,
and it's of little moment to me,
seed on the wind,
what worlds are born of my words,
what ends, what begins,
what comes of what I cannot say,
but I want to say something
with the savour of time in it
that's worth living for a little more each day
like a small tree rooted like a thought
in a crevasse of eternity,
greening the moon.
Late at night, in the darkness,
while the silence is off preserving something,
and all I can hear is your breath
off in the distance like an ocean,
I want to unpack my vagrant heart
like a patched guitar-case,
a grave-robber in a pyramid,
and attune my afterlife
to the key of this one
in such a way
I can play like a new star in Orion
to all the sad, beautiful fireflies of the moment
that hover over us like living constellations of our own
not bound to any paradigm of light
that can only be touched by a mountain of stone.
I want to paint something
that feels like the flower
that just brushed against your hand,
I want to be inspired by the mystic blue of midnight
like window glass fired in the kiln of a star
that has looked upon the suffering of humans for so long,
their atrocities and deprivations,
their terrors and wrecked joys,
compassion has turned it into an eye so clear
you can sip water from it like tears
that taste of the history of blood and wine
that danced alone like a vine at its own wedding
with a bride of rain that unveiled herself
like falling chandeliers.
Unfailingly, absurdly, obsessively human
in the shadow of thundering magnitudes
that feel like the extinctions of gods
that time has wheeled out
to the enormity of the gravepit
that limes every abyss of the heart
with the stars of a new universe,
I want to add one candle to the shining
in a folly of insight so illuminating
even the earliest galaxies
forever entering the darkness
on the threshold of their first shedding
could see it, something
so profoundly vernal and intimate
even I can believe in it.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Not To Be With You
Not to be with you,
not to know your breathing beside me,
not to be able to put my arms around you
and kiss the black candles away,
change skies with a glance,
feel your mystery seeping into me
like a veil of rain,
my heart a hive of stars,
my body crazed
by a fragrance of the moon,
to feel the intimate moment hang
like a dropp of dew
poised like the silence that falls before it;
is a mountain peering down into its own valley
at a whisper of cloud
that passes like a secret,
a red carpet of blood that wants to fly
laid out for an unknown dignitary.
You are not here
but I walk with you alone
under the smudged moonlight,
through the tidal shadows of soft, ebbing trees,
and gusts of warm air touch me like your skin,
and the assent in your eyes
is a colour only the heart can see,
and my longing is a map to anywhere
my mouth might meet yours,
and my hands visit the shrines of your body
like pilgrims full of reverence
for an infidel religion
with beautiful eyes,
with sacred scars and a language
that is born along
with the serpent fire of my ripening passion
to annihilate myself in your doorway,
to unspool the river
in the supple coral of your water-rose,
the keel of my tongue
circumnavigating your startled equators,
and all your tender meridians
bowstrings taut with anticipation
of electric arrows released in ecstasy,
both of us wounded by insatiable joy
in a storm of mushrooms and black cherries,
in the oceanic hunger of the sea
for an oracular island of forbidden frenzies,
for mystic releases
that free oblivion from servitude
and teach the chains of existence
to dance to the music
of their own liberation,
their own falling away like rain,
that the true ground of their being
was always the wind
that binds the message to the world
in the arms of lovers creating each other
from black palettes in the darkness,
from moss and apricots,
from the long wharves
of interminable kisses
that gore like the horns of garden snails,
from the fountain-mouths of ancient eclipses,
the dark abundance
of the feast that is received like eyes
and the night chutes that open nocturnal poppies
like auroras of furious sugar
to squander the stars
in the throats of jubilant black holes,
to appease the unattainable
with the inexhaustible satiation of gratified silos.
Not to be with you,
my wings ache with urgent migrations,
and I am as impetuous as a sword
in the foundries of my blood,
and my voice
is the remote thunder of humbled apples,
and my dragons swarm
the abyss of your beauty
like shepherd moons, sunspots,
a calendar of desires
that marks every phase of your body off
as an apostate holiday,
the omen that winnows
a harvest of bells.
Not to be with you is a cloak
that weighs more than the night sky,
the eyelid of an iron rose,
a feather of lead
that drowns in its own reflection
like the shadow of a flightless longing,
the unquenchable silence
of a well on the moon
listening for rain.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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In You
In you I come to the end of roads,
and an alphabet of burning wings
falls from an indigo sky
like meteors trying to write
the unsayable in a slash of light,
in a language of luminous scars
the night beatifies with mystic knowledge
that wants to name you
so deeply in thresholds and stars
the charged silence
is giving birth to an indelible mouth,
a doorway of blood,
an ancient grammar of fire
the wind puts on like a robe
to scry the darkness for a voice
that could fill the goblets
of the moon's dead seas
with the wine of a radiant wound,
so much within me
already the tongue of a bell
that can taste you like blackberries.
The whole of you
in every single dropp of your eyes,
you are the black swan
of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,
the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon
that sways like a bell in the night,
even your absence a shape of cherishing,
a harvest of shadows beyond the light
of the lamp that burns for you.
Within the deepest abyss of myself
where the heart stands alone
like a single black pillar
in the twilight wasteland of the world,
a mysterious temple to the ultimacy
of having been here once
to suffer the passage of form and time,
everything a gesture of space
that thaws back into itself,
I have written your name
in the hourglass of my blood
like a whisper of secret ink
that once voiced the light to be
and shook the stars like wheat
out of its blind abundance
and will be remembered forever
as the first intimacy of the sea,
and there is the rumour
of a dream in the air,
the fragrance of an approach,
that out of an ocean of light
the tide will embody a woman
like the shore of an island
littered with fingertips and kisses
enmeshed like galaxies and starfish
in the exhalation of her veils
and our lips will meet like archers,
and our bodies will sing like arrows
sunk like orchards through the heart
and long after the last flame of life is shed,
the night will silence the birds
in the groves where we bled like poppies
to open the gates of the mystery
like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls
that chants its prayers to the night
like the slow alarm of autumn geese
in the eyes of a human face.
I try to say what can't be said,
pouring my spirit
into the wineskin of every word,
but my heart is a larger apple
than the bough of my voice can bear,
and the silence
that would erect temples everywhere like flowers
spun from the auroral silks of my soul
and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,
every emotion a priest with a shaven head
to honour the moon
climbing the stairwell within me
of a million horizons at once
in every breathless step,
falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship
that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat
or a message in a bottle
that pleads like wine with the emptiness
for an alphabet that isn't in arrears to time
to say you to the night
in a lightning breath of life beyond
these elemental likenesses I carve
from a quarry of stars.
And I know I ask for immortal children
from a human womb,
and wide as my powers are
to exceed the sky with homing birds,
to adorn the dead branch with windows
that dazzle the roots of dawn,
I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,
a stone man with a chain for a tongue
when I try to swim like Atlantis
through the depths of your shining within
and the last word, the last life
to flash across my mind as I drown
again and again like a pulse
in the embrace of your beauty
is always the world as it is
before anything was said.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Mad or Enlightened
Mad or enlightened the same, the universe
is an embryo of darkness born in upon itself, everywhere
its own womb breaking into the pulse of stars within stars,
and everywhere, the shining before the light, the dark mirror
showing the light its own face for the first time,
how in an eventually that is always now
it would attain flowers and eyes along the way
and become the skin of the rain as it falls to earth in April.
If I change to fire, these letters burn, blow away as ash
on the tongue of the wind; if water, then the stars put themselves out
in their own weeping like candles drowning in tears.
Every step of the journey around ourselves
is another world, another garden to plant the seed-names
we’ve shaken from autumns in other realms
and carried around like sacred jewels
we forgot in the corners of our pockets and hearts. Believe it;
when I am all stars; you are all the listening darkness
I pour myself into like a drunkard into a bottomless glass
and you raise me to your lips and drink yourself up
until you’re blinded into clarity
by all the open cages of the light.
Why lie in your own coffin, night after starless night,
if you’re not empowered by your long obedience?
Better to open your eyes on the other side
of your horizontal door, better to come knocking from the outside,
deluded vertically, than suffer this poverty of blood within
the hushed precincts of your skyless realm,
the skull-bone basilicas of your private Vaticans and law libraries.
When it wakes up in the morning
there’s no book-dust in the eyes of the light.
Before you now, in your endless beginning, the dream
you thought you had rubbed from your eyes, you
waking up like a key inside the heart of the dream.
There’s nothing you can’t unlock, even
gardens on the moon or the ancient futures of past lives
death only pruned back with shears to bloom again
in the efflorescence of your eyes, early dawns in the new arraying.
Who you are flows into who you are, all one river of seeing,
dizzy and composed in its own running, all
your own eddies and currents, swamps and white-water,
auroral maids of the mist when you fall in separate drops,
weeping’s just a waterfall, and frenzied tides of being
when you crash ashore out of your own wholeness into buddhas and bums.
In the fire, everyone’s crazy with passion and intelligence,
everyone’s smashed on the wine of an unknown guest
trying to be remembered by his friends.
What visions abound in the orchards of the blessing,
What hearts are torn out and thrown upon the fire
like planets called home by the longing of the sun? We are the white shadows
of the someone else who is walking up ahead
like the moon on the path of its own reflection.
Catch up to yourself and drown in the luminosity of your own being.
Who needs a map to the road they’re walking
or sages pointing all along the way, grey as barnboard signs,
or luminaries at night
pointing to the darkness. The pivot of the worlds points to itself.
True north is not a direction. Haven’t you guessed by now; the stars
all circle you like stormbirds drawn to a lighthouse on the coast of heaven,
too in love with your light to heed your warning about
the deep dragon grief that opens the mouth of the wound
that killed it into life, a one-edged sword of light
in the hands of a holy assassin darker than the silence
of the sun at midnight. If you listen with your eyes,
you can hear in that mournful emptiness
God calling out to God, lover and beloved,
through the echoless valley, across the waveless sea,
yours the name on the prow of the ship that breaks through the veils of the storm,
and yours the name of the storm. You are the bird
that answers the green bough; the lightning in the rigging.
You are the sigh of the silence
and the mystic pen in the hand of the saying.
Whatever worlds you dress for, fields and flowers,
or stars and hourglass elsewhere zones, you are the body of being,
and yours the gowns and robes of creation you draw from the abyss
like clothes from a private closet, dignified in your scriptures,
intimate in your jewels. And everywhere you coyly let yourself fall
like earrings of rain, scarves of fire, fragrances of light,
and watch to see who of the many lovers that are you
bends down like the sky to pick them up at your feet
and return them to you like the first crescent of the moon
rising like an eyelid out of sleep
to greet itself reflected in your face.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Want To Make A Contribution
I want to make a contribution.
I want to leave something on the stairs of the temple
in the dead of the night and steal away like a shadow,
hoping my small gift of a gift is well-received.
That the stars don't think they're wasting their light
to shine down upon it. Nor the wind resent the seeds it carries.
Fifty years of poetry. Painting the picture-music
the darkness pours into my heart and my heart conveys to my ears.
I can taste thousands of wildflowers like eyes in my blood.
I can taste the homelessness of the rogue stars in my tears,
and pull the wounded swords I cull like thorns of the rose
from the stone of my brain that fell in the farmer's field
like a rock through the window of the abyss
and make it clear as Merlin locked in his tower of glass,
that the stars only look fixed from a distance,
up close and intimate as atoms they're in a frenzy of creation
like a cloud of gnats in the last rapture of the sunset
radioactive with the bliss of being alive to know this.
That we're all longing for home in the lap of an expansive awareness
that threw the starmaps away the moment we were born
into the radiance of things that let go of the light
as if they knew something they just couldn't keep to themselves
without doing great injury to the flowers of life
that space was mind, and time was its emotional life
and as the dark mother said to her last incarnation
as it was stepping through the doorway into a stranger,
we're just going to wing it from here on end.
I want to be a strong storm tree twisted and bent by the wind
like the last letter of a sacred alphabet with no alpha or omega
to mark where things begin and end like death in life.
And wind up like a windfall of sweet fruit without end.
I want to make something of my falling, I want to honour
the table I eat at like iron and carbon and oxygen
by bringing something back for what I have received
without asking, or making a decision when I was not aware
of some unimaginable god that holds me personally responsible for it.
What a sleight to humans everywhere matter enjoins them
in a common labour to resonate so perfectly with the light
that lucidity isn't the exclusive property of the unknown,
and just because it's dark, the new moon of the black swan
shedding the feathers of the white, doesn't mean, it's not enlightened.
Though I come like a bird to a windowsill, though I pass
like a star from the window, though I sing of death
on the green bough, though I sing of life on the dead,
though I have been a dragon, a kitten, and a bee,
though I have floundered in sorrows like a lifeboat
way over my head, and lived through starless nights of fear
pulled down like executioners hoods over my eyes,
waiting to see what the morning brings that's vital,
I have not trafficked with my life like a pimp in a flower bed.
I have endured whatever excruciating transfigurations
I've ever had to go through, naked as a knife of light
unsheathed from the ore of this body that can no more
be cast off on the slag heap, than my spirit can paint in blood
a mural of all the changes we've been through like stars and mud.
I want to deepen the roots of the flowering night.
I want to beseech the poppies with my eyes
for more luminous experiences of cadmium red light
for more mystery among the stars than even they're aware of,
for more moons in the apple, more suns in the bread,
for more crazy wisdom than there is the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
I want to show the pine-cones they're pagodas as well
and point out where the mourning doves nest under their eyelids
and the shamans dwell in the upper branches of their evergreens
waiting to see if down will come cradle, baby and all,
or the next ascent is a red-tailed hawk at liberty
to fall upon whatever it likes, raising the snake of the lowest
up into the mystic delirium of the highest
to feather its scales in boas of oxymoronic light.
I want to intensify the dark until people can find
their way home by it, stars that broke into themselves
like morning glory tangled in an old bicycle wheel.
A pine-cone would do, a locket of sky, a piece of straw,
I could offer anything I wanted to, all those nests and pockets
I made in my pillow for years like a cat with a catcher's mitt
trying to find the perfect spot for its nightmare to sleep.
Or any one of a hundred cornerstones that were never built upon
or were torn down before the first brick laid.
Or I could lay my life down like a grain of wheat
among millions, at the feet of a silo so immaculately empty
it's never needed a single one of us, or all the animals
that bleated and bellowed and bled upon the earth
because we started drinking blood long before
we turned to bread like a better body to sacrifice.
Or my eyes like little thumb-drives of everything they've seen.
A gift of a gift as was given to me without a giver,
the ashes of a dead butterfly on a pyre of autumn leaves,
without ritual, celestial spin, I just want to come by myself
like a human in confusion we make the labour of our lives
as if I were stepping out of the trees like a white-tailed buck
come down to the river to drink from the moonlight
and add my reflection to the water that gave it to me,
with my head bowed toward the earth like a broken branch
heavy with the scarred fruits of life that have sweetened
like the moon over the years, poems I can recite by heart,
like the names of the stars and the flowers and the birds
and the ghosts of all those sad, passionate women who
tried so hard to be happy their tears clung like eyes
to the mystery of the windows they kept looking through
as if they were resilvering the mirrors of old telescopes
with the dew of a morning from a long time ago
witching in the dark for stars to explain their loss.
I want to bring a word that's been so deeply hidden in the open
like the flower of a rootless tree, it's got no colour of its own,
no seed, no leaf, no humming bird or bee, the tuning fork
of the nightbird, but no song, no honey, no nectar,
no likeness anywhere to compare it with, demonic or benign,
no meaning no mouth has ever wrapped itself around
like the atmosphere of a habitable planet, though the wind has tried,
a word so indelibly original it can't be washed out
like the whisper of a watercolour in the ear of a solar flare,
a word so private it gets said over the graves of the sacred syllables
that died in the mouths of men like the names of their gods,
not a prayer, not a mantra, not the shriek of a war-cry,
not a curse, not a blessing, not the answer to anything,
and I want to say the unsayable so unsayably free of veils
no junkie in the snakepit of a burning spoon, no lover
thawing virgin watersheds in the nunnery of Madame Moon
has ever stood so naked in their own eyes
even the emptiness inside felt overdressed for the occasion.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Your Eyes For Awhile
Your eyes for awhile
were the only eyes
I could see through
to catch a glimpse of god;
were windows into my own soul
that I could look through from the outside
without throwing the moon
through my reflection like a stone
in the hand of an angry boy.
And it was always as true
as the way your heart grew
that you could love strangers
easier than I do even now
after all these years of learning how
to talk to mirrors in their own language.
And you were not one woman
but all women forever
when I saw you once
bending down like the dusk
to touch the last of the flowers
as if you would never see them again.
As serene as the evening
there was no labour in your beauty
and I swear when I saw you that night
I felt as if I were the whole world watching
time put a finger to its lips
and pour its fountain
into the flow of your body
as if it were the sum of all passage.
And though I was your friend in all things
every evening since
the candle went out
in the lantern of a lost tomorrow
I have walked out into abandoned fields alone
and asked the saddest questions
of the most distant stars
knowing there is not enough light sometimes
even in the eyes of God
to be a companion of our sorrows.
And the questions grow longer
as the darkness deepens
the echo of my longing
in a well as dry as my skull
and closes its gates like scars.
And then those nights come
like a life or a day
or even just this moment
when I stop asking
why human suffering
is always indescribably true
and joyful as an irreproachable buffoon
sword-dancing alone with the moon
who writes me dangerous loveletters
as if she were the Lady of the Lake
receiving me back
like a funeral ship
into this mysterium of you,
I can almost believe that you know
even though the night mocks the crow
that pines for mercy
and turns its lightless face toward you
as if it could still feel
the warmth of the sun at midnight
in your eyes again
like the afterlife of light
playing with fireflies in the abyss
now that the summer constellations have gone down;
that somehow you must know
like a guitar
on the far side of a room
where someone is singing
as if they had their ear
to the womb
of your irrevocable absence
that binds me to you with every breath
I take for two
as if I had learned to live on death
to keep you alive in me
where you still flow through the seasons
on the nightstreams of my blood
like blossoms and leaves and stars
and the moon leaves no scars on the water;
must know. Or a demon’s a kinder face
to bestow on the darkness
than a black hole without eyes,
though it’s taken many, long, painful years
for the night to share the light with its jewels again
and as many schools as there are fools to fill them
that even just one
of those slightly compassionate smiles
you would send across the room
to cool the furnace of my heart
with the lightness of one snowflake,
one feather
gracing a change in the weather,
knew more about love
as a raindropp knows the sea
than all of us
who have been washed up
on this cold, lonely shore together
thinking we may have been saved
for something more
than this tidal longing
to brave the sea again
and even if doomed to drown
as I have learned
from this shale of pain
that has carbon-dated the eras
of my missing you
like a life that didn’t
flash before my eyes
as I went down for good with everything,
to thank-you, o, yes,
with nothing but love and light in my heart
and your face in the eye of my solitude
as I stand before the sea in gratitude
to thank-you
as you well knew one day I could
for the generosity of the wound
that has run like my life
down these eyes
these windows
this page
these empty mirrors
of autumn rain
that have wept for years without you
just to see you again
for one moment more
than the time I have left
to know that I never will.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Let Me Be Worthy
Let me be worthy of the river
and the strange ores that glow at night,
buried like teachers in the mountain;
let my blood always taste of the moon
and my heart burn like a black rose,
like the poem in the fire
that sweetened the sky with a flower of smoke,
for the wisdom of the generously unattainable,
and transcend the hell that shadows the folly
of not being foolish.
May the stars,
when they gather in gardens
water the roots of my seeing from clear fountains
and the wind bleed like ink from my pen
when I’m wounded by the beauty and the terror
of my helplessness.
When I am large, spacious, profound,
let me sit like the universe
on the throne of a seed
that lies in the dirt;
and when I am small, brief,
a trinket of light in a flash of ephemera,
robe me in the lion skin of the night sky
and ennoble me
with delusion and enlightenment
on this road of ghosts.
Whatever befall,
let me perish or prosper as a human
who insists upon the divinity of all
and burns and rises
for the heresy and truth of it.
Let anyone born be accounted a hero,
a lifeboat that hauled the world aboard
when the seas raged in the womb
to give birth to suffering;
and may I always be entrusted
with the ancient shales of dark courage it takes
to look into the dragon’s eyes
and not be horrified
by the ferocity of the freedom
that thaws space
like an hourglass in the rain.
And should love occur
to shape the blade of the moon
on the anvil of my heart,
and a cauldron of passionate visions
scald the eyes with intimate glimpses
of myriad heavens and hells,
all truer than reason,
may my bitterness pass
like the eclipse of an hour,
a left-handed blessing,
no vinegar of injured illusion
accept the sad surrender of the wine
like the death poppy of a folded flag,
no tar of judgment and denial
feather the dream with stone pillows,
no abyss under the brief era of an eyelid,
make me too petty or afraid
to dance with my skin off
engulfed like the wind
in secret sails of mystic fire.
There’s always a clown, a jester
who rides beside the hero like an anti-self,
a thoroughbred and a dray
yoked to the little red wagon of the heart
like two thieves either side
of an unwitnessed crucifixion,
two dadaphors, two torches
disposed like opposible hinges
on a door that opens like water
at the whisper of a key.
Let me be the clown-prince
of my own idiotic profundities then,
let me survive my way into the wisdom
of the inspired fools
who know that anything they ask for
from the stolen bounty of the king
is just another absurdity in disguise,
that even laughter isn’t a lifeline.
I’ve always had my heart
caught in my throat
like a bird in a chimney,
a cork in a wine-bottle,
a habitable planet in a black hole.
I have loved and befriended
almost anyone
who would let me
and seen their evanescence,
their transience, their vagrancy, their passage
through this mansion of space
with the amazing windows and chandeliers,
the sad brevity of the things they cherished.
Blind to restorative grails,
I have not sought the meaning of life,
I have not hunted the dragon with nets,
knowing reality is meaningless
because it has no fingers,
it doesn’t point to anything beyond itself,
nor bear witness in a mirror,
but I have walked in the peacock robes
of the twilight sky, all eyes,
in the gardens of the life of meaning,
past the hushed bloodtalk of the roses,
and seen for myself
that there are flowers with petals of water
and roots of fire
that drink the stars like rain.
Meaning dethrones the flowers like bottle-caps
and there’s no refund on the empties.
Night puts its hands over your eyes
and asks you to guess;
and there’s no end of the mystery,
no end of the blessing
of sitting under a tree
looking up at a star
wondering what human beings,
what you are doing on earth;
what a thought is, an emotion,
the blade of grass beside you,
everything alone together
in the silent boat of the rising moon
docking at its own reflection
as if the port were always in the voyage,
understanding
merely an expression of the intensity
of our not knowing.
The answers come and go,
governments, religions, arts, sciences, fortune-cookies,
like parking meters, like waterbirds,
like oceans on the moon.
Life is the lock that opens the key,
the skymouth of the dream that woke itself up
talking in its sleep,
trying to remember the dreamer.
Like the fleets and caravans
of the seeds on the autumn wind
we are the purest expression
of a universe
that answers us with ourselves
when we ask for a sign.
Like cherries that ripen in the silence
of the deepening night,
turning our tears to wine,
our darkness into eyes,
may my shadows always be worthy
of the light that casts them.
Fifty-seven years a human being,
fifty-seven years of suffering and doubt,
of boredom and magmatic intensities,
of mystic elation and mythic insignificance,
of anger, danger, risk, defeat and victory,
of saying and seeing,
of trying to kiss the shadow of my pain away
by deepening my ignorance
and progressing backwards
through the re-runs of old eclipses
that once gorged on the moon like dragons.
Tonight the wind howls bitterly outside
and the stars seem eras away in the cold
as if the intimacy I have felt with their shining
since I was a boy
were just another leaf torn from the tree.
It’s rare to catch a glimpse of your agony,
to see that even the brightest fountains
of your efflorescence
are rooted in a wounded watershed
that has never known the colour of your eyes.
I don’t need to be forgiven
for being born;
and I won’t be poured
like a tidal wine
into a life that isn’t mine
however many cracks appear in the cup,
however I recede and leak out of myself,
my blood isn’t anyone else’s signature,
and this walking to nowhere I call a poem,
no one’s footprints following me but my own.
How should it be otherwise
that I fall like rain
to appease this rumour of life
like a fire in my roots
and flash through the creekbeds
of my own flowing
like time returning to its hidden source
with news of nothing?
An echo of light
looking for its lost voice like a star,
I don’t need to prove myself to the night
like a theory in the heart of a passing stranger
and space is the only death mask
that is the true likeness of my face.
No more than the light and the rain
that open the seeds like love-letters,
I don’t need to know
what I will become
or what was revealed behind me in the dark,
but let me be worthy
of this wounded boat of the moment
with its cargo of eyes
enduring the burden and inspiration
of the voyage
like illegal refugees
with forged passports to Atlantis;
and if I must be accounted
one of the martyrs of absurdity,
then let me be as generous as wings
to the worms in my name
that blindly tilled the soil
of a rootless country.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Let Me Be Worthy Of The River
Let me be worthy of the river
and the strange ores that glow at night,
buried like teachers in the mountain;
let my blood always taste of the moon
and my heart burn like a black rose,
like the poem in the fire
that sweetened the sky with a flower of smoke,
for the wisdom of the generously unattainable,
and transcend the hell that shadows the folly
of not being foolish.
May the stars,
when they gather in gardens
water the roots of my seeing from clear fountains
and the wind bleed like ink from my pen
when I'm wounded by the beauty and the terror
of my helplessness.
When I am large, spacious, profound,
let me sit like the universe
on the throne of a seed
that lies in the dirt;
and when I am small, brief,
a trinket of light in a flash of ephemera,
robe me in the lion skin of the night sky
and ennoble me
with delusion and enlightenment
on this road of ghosts.
Whatever befall,
let me perish or prosper as a human
who insists upon the divinity of all
and burns and rises
for the heresy and truth of it.
Let anyone born be accounted a hero,
a lifeboat that hauled the world aboard
when the seas raged in the womb
to give birth to suffering;
and may I always be entrusted
with the ancient shales of dark courage it takes
to look into the dragon's eyes
and not be horrified
by the ferocity of the freedom
that thaws space
like an hourglass in the rain.
And should love occur
to shape the blade of the moon
on the anvil of my heart,
and a cauldron of passionate visions
scald the eyes with intimate glimpses
of myriad heavens and hells,
all truer than reason,
may my bitterness pass
like the eclipse of an hour,
a left-handed blessing,
no vinegar of injured illusion
accept the sad surrender of the wine
like the death poppy of a folded flag,
no tar of judgment and denial
feather the dream with stone pillows,
no abyss under the brief era of an eyelid,
make me too petty or afraid
to dance with my skin off
engulfed like the wind
in secret sails of mystic fire.
There's always a clown, a jester
who rides beside the hero like an anti-self,
a thoroughbred and a dray
yoked to the little red wagon of the heart
like two thieves either side
of an unwitnessed crucifixion,
two dadaphors, two torches
disposed like opposable hinges
on a door that opens like water
at the whisper of a key.
Let me be the clown-prince
of my own idiotic profundities then,
let me survive my way into the wisdom
of the inspired fools
who know that anything they ask for
from the stolen bounty of the king
is just another absurdity in disguise,
that even laughter isn't a lifeline.
I've always had my heart
caught in my throat
like a bird in a chimney,
a cork in a wine-bottle,
a habitable planet in a black hole.
I have loved and befriended
almost anyone
who would let me
and seen their evanescence,
their transigence, their vagrancy, their passage
through this mansion of space
with the amazing windows and chandeliers,
the sad brevity of the things they cherished.
Blind to restorative grails,
I have not sought the meaning of life,
I have not hunted the dragon with nets,
knowing reality is meaningless
because it has no fingers,
it doesn't point to anything beyond itself,
nor bear witness in a mirror,
but I have walked in the peacock robes
of the twilight sky, all eyes,
in the gardens of the life of meaning,
past the hushed bloodtalk of the roses,
and seen for myself
that there are flowers with petals of water
and roots of fire
that drink the stars like rain.
Meaning dethrones the flowers like bottle-caps
and there's no refund on the empties.
Night puts its hands over your eyes
and asks you to guess;
and there's no end of the mystery,
no end of the blessing
of sitting under a tree
looking up at a star
wondering what human beings,
what you are doing on earth;
what a thought is, an emotion,
the blade of grass beside you,
everything alone together
in the silent boat of the rising moon
docking at its own reflection
as if the port were always in the voyage,
understanding
merely an expression of the intensity
of our not knowing.
The answers come and go,
governments, religions, arts, sciences, fortune-cookies,
like parking meters, like waterbirds,
like oceans on the moon.
Life is the lock that opens the key,
the skymouth of the dream that woke itself up
talking in its sleep,
trying to remember the dreamer.
Like the fleets and caravans
of the seeds on the autumn wind
we are the purest expression
of a universe
that answers us with ourselves
when we ask for a sign.
Like cherries that ripen in the silence
of the deepening night,
turning our tears to wine,
our darkness into eyes,
may my shadows always be worthy
of the light that casts them.
Sixty-three years a human being,
sixty-three years of suffering and doubt,
of boredom and magmatic intensities,
of mystic elation and mythic insignificance,
of anger, danger, risk, defeat and victory,
of saying and seeing,
of trying to kiss the shadow of my pain away
by deepening my ignorance
and progressing backwards
through the re-runs of old eclipses
that once gorged on the moon like dragons.
Tonight the wind howls bitterly outside
and the stars seem eras away in the cold
as if the intimacy I have felt with their shining
since I was a boy
were just another leaf torn from the tree.
It's rare to catch a glimpse of your agony,
to see that even the brightest fountains
of your efflorescence
are rooted in a wounded watershed
that has never known the colour of your eyes.
I don't need to be forgiven
for being born;
and I won't be poured
like a tidal wine
into a life that isn't mine
however many cracks appear in the cup,
however I recede and leak out of myself,
my blood isn't anyone else's signature,
and this walking to nowhere I call a poem,
no one's footprints following me but my own.
How should it be otherwise
that I fall like rain
to appease this rumour of life
like a fire in my roots
and flash through the creekbeds
of my own flowing
like time returning to its hidden source
with news of nothing?
An echo of light
looking for its lost voice like a star,
I don't need to prove myself to the night
like a theory in the heart of a passing stranger
and space is the only death mask
that is the true likeness of my face.
No more than the light and the rain
that open the seeds like love-letters,
I don't need to know
what I will become
or what was revealed behind me in the dark,
but let me be worthy
of this wounded boat of the moment
with its cargo of eyes
enduring the burden and inspiration
of the voyage
like illegal refugees
with forged passports to Atlantis;
and if I must be accounted
one of the martyrs of absurdity,
then let me be as generous as wings
to the worms in my name
that blindly tilled the soil
of a rootless country.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Journey
I’m on some kind of journey
but I don’t know where it’s going;
I’m growing wings and shedding them,
and I’m true to every thought in my head.
I’ve got a heart, worn down at heels,
a used voodoo doll quilled like a native,
a meteorically battered planet
that wobbles between a kiss and a fist
in the way it keeps running itself around.
I spend too much time alone.
There are no obstructions in any direction;
and barefoot, I’m walking on stars and poppies,
talking to myself like a candle,
weaving my way among the shadows
like a fish through the supple harps
of the silver river reeds. I see
that I’m taking a bath in my own grave
to wash the soiled skies of the painted world
off my eyes, to behold
the brief career of the leaf of life
and how the light gusts out from the windows
like curtains and bird-nets. Life is short
and the new temple never gets further built
than a hole and a single cornerstone, the rest
left to the business of the earth,
all that beauty and magnificence,
unravelled among the mud weavers.
I was inoculated against death
by a splinter of the moon;
by how little time there is for love,
for the root to get drunk
on the fruits of enlightenment and compassion,
by how little I will ever know
of the road to the doorway I stepped through
to stand in awe before the moonspill
on the raven blue waters,
and to look so deeply into the eyes of a woman
who has just conceded an island in her passage,
and the fragrance of unheard music
that I am a pillar of wonder
before the unsayable
as she lets dropp her shadows and feathers of light,
and the blood-god assumes
his flowering crown of fire
to enhance the splendours of his courtly intensities.
What I have lost in the river
I will find in the river
and what I have taken from the sky
I will give back to the sky,
and there shall come a day
when the eclipse will be the brighter mirror,
and the darkness that overtakes me now
will be a gate of stars to a water palace
where the dragonflies and waterlilies
are the sceptres and crowns of a human divinity
that will endure like a whisper of radiance,
a more haunting taste of light,
the rumour of a black rose
that outshines the angels
that coax the lanterns out of the night.
I will evaporate like the flaring of fireflies
on the windy shore of a trembling lake,
like the blue hat plume of smoke
from a gallant winter chimney
into the vastness of my own mind
like a waterbird without a trace into a sweeter, wilder solitude.
And these words will come and go
like the tides of the ocean I was,
like the providential leaves
of unfurling fortune-cookies,
like an avalanche of gold
washed down from the mountain upstream.
I write them in flowing diamond,
I write them in auroras of blood,
in dawns bluer than the iris of a peacock’s eye,
in fire and water and the mystic inks of the night
in the fleeting, indelible dream
of doors and hands and moons,
in warm breath on a cold window,
in a halo of comets
smeared into light by the sun,
in the sidereal wines that bled from bitter wounds,
I have said what it was mine to say
on a page of the wind
that whistled through me like life
greening the sands of the hourglass
with visions that ripened the bell of blood in my heart
to fall like wisdom from its tower
toward a fallible paradise
that won’t leave me as I am for long.
And I will jump again
into this cauldron of joys and sorrows
to string my spinal cord
over the abyss of the guitar-shaped universe,
walking upright
to plead with my own answers
to thaw like a mirror
estranged from the world it reflects
in the self-effacing flames
of the passionate gardens that dance on the wicks.
The awakening seed
echoes these flowers of fire
in the valley of a voice in the furnace
that lies down in the cool grass
by a stream of idle stars
and arrays its vagrant heart
like a breeze of blood in the dust
to the refugees in the shadows.
They move like eyelids
through all the phases of the moon
from an unspooled well of darkness
to the slash of a razor of light
to the threshing of the full harvest
in the siloes of the nightwind
enthroned like a breath of life
in the midst of its own dispersal.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I'll Wear This Robe
I'll wear this robe like a desert;
and release the hinges on the gate
that is closing like a rib cage
on the heart of the nightbird
that returns to the silence
like water taken from a river.
I'll pour the moon out of its stone cup
and let this vine of eyes,
this bone of light
wander where it will
in search of a face in the darkness
sweeter than the blood-vows of wine.
These flowers aren't the rags
of the legends of radiance
and a dragon doesn't waste eclipses
on the blind.
The wind opens its hand
and I disappear like a gust of crows
in the startled night groves.
I will drag this empty robe of blood along the ground
like a wounded sky,
a desolate poppy
broken like a kite
on the power lines of its dreams.
I don't know what hurt me;
so long, so long ago I was a child,
and now I am a man, and aging
and the water snarls
and bares its fangs of frost,
and impales my heart
inflamed with grief for so much that has passed
without understanding
on the horns of the moon.
My ignorance has been
deeply authorized by life
and more and more often now
my blood coagulates into roses
and seals my mouth with wax
like a regal mandate
to succeed myself in silence
and let my throne
avalanche down the mountain
like just another rockslide,
another round of asteroids,
another fallen temple
freaked with mystic ore that never made it to the surface.
You ask me where I've been
like a road you befriended along the way,
but I'd have to know where I was going
to tell you that
and I've come to the end of myself
like starlight in a loaf of bread,
a candle that burnt like a voice in the night
to obviate the emptiness,
to warm the abyss momentarily
with the glow of our human divinity,
to say we were here once
like the flower in the field,
the star over the hill,
the face in the window
that watches as we pass
like the shadow of a bird
cast by the flames of a hidden fire,
a pulse of the moon,
the eyelid of a wave
that imagined the sea beneath it
before it broke like a vision
on this shore of flesh
where everything must be abandoned.
I want to be with you
like your eyes are
if you'll let me be.
I want to silver my breath
in the longest night
of your loneliest fountain.
And many have sworn,
and many along the way
have perished like echoes and flowers
at the insistence of a rootless word.
And there have been nights,
eras of darkness and sorrow
drawn from a stranger's well
that have bent the path I took,
and scattered my footprints
like refugees and colonists
that turned native
like an exhausted emotion
when their loneliness went wild and crazy
in a solitude even the moon couldn't fill.
And I have stared
long and deeply into the abyss of the night
and felt the stars stub themselves out
in the sandy hourglass of my ashtray heart.
How desperately
I have rummaged through
this encyclopedia of lives
to find one that wasn't a prelude to tears,
my heart a lost boot,
laced with a snapped spinal cord,
its mouth
muzzled like a junkyard dog
with an elastic band
to keep body and soul together,
only to proofread sky after sky,
page after page of stars
pricked out in braille,
fingering my name
carved in funereal kells and runes
on another boundary stone.
Nothing binds me.
No one wants my heart enough
to consult it like a map
to where I'm buried like gold
under the tongue of a dangerous angel
who wants to wake up beside you
like a spear of fire
I will fall upon like life, like a lover,
to wound my way back into paradise.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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After You Leave
After you leave, a bell
deeper than the sea strikes once
and my blood thinks it's a ghost of fire
and tries to evaporate; gusts
of the most graceful emotions,
eloquent clarities of the heart,
shake me free of myself
like leaves and petals and pages,
the tender radiance of nightskies,
and I am astounded in the openness
of an embrace without limits,
of boundary stones being hurled delinquently
through the windows of ice-age mirrors
that have wept so long and slowly
over the silver river locked in chains.
How easy in this solitude
to declare myself to you,
to undo the delusions and the fears,
to flip through the chapters of the onion,
take off this last layer of skin,
and shed the final masks of snow
in the warming recollection of your presence,
in the way your beauty exhilarates me
then thrusts me like a torch into a deep silence,
and my heart sets out by itself toward you
scintillant everywhere, gold
flowing out of the dark ore,
as if the moon rinsed out its own reflection,
the legend of a secret constellation
behind the vital starmap of fireflies
that makes me want to shine for you so intensely
in this dark doorway of pain and passage
that the light hurts with the poignancy
of its longing to fall like a key
from the spirit's lost and found
upon your planet;
to open gardens that have no word
for fence or gate,
to bridge your streams
with the pillars and roots of inspired stars.
My heart sets out for you all by itself
like a lantern on a road
that unspools with arrival at every step.
After you leave I am possessed of the will
of an anvil and a forge
to become a chalice for you, a sword,
an axle and a plough, a strong bolt
against the miscreance of battering circumstance.
I raise your reflection to my lips
like a cup from a watershed of wine
and in every single sip
swallow an ocean like a potion
from the tears of the moon,
knowing how dangerous it could be
to miss you, to become
an addict of your light at the first taste,
to wait for eras for the return of the dawn
that unravels even now like mystic lightning through my veins.
No more than the sun from the vine,
the moon from the dreaming apple
the stars from the ripening vowel of the apricot,
could any torn net woven of knotted lifelines
undo the vision you have already mingled
like a night rose of fragrant fire in my blood,
Not to drift again alone
like an empty boat
ferrying the corpse of the ferryman
through the fog to a cold shore
now that I've been washed up on your island
like the voice of a salvaged star in a bottle,
a frenzy of light and love in your tides,
a drowned lighthouse
coming to life in every wave of you.
I want to be brave enough
to risk the possibility
of listening to the night together
with the unveiled bride of the moon
in the bay of my arms,
I want to be the sail, the flame,
the gull of her breathing,
the blue dolphin off the coast of her mouth.
I want to swim like a mirror
the sea holds up to her face
to do her hair up with starfish
she tresses like galaxies in the depths;
I want to devote myself like a candle
to the shrine of the September moonrise
that saturates the far sky over the sad hills
like a warm breath glowing on chilled glass
when she smiles
like the wind over the abundant harvest
of the ashes I've stored against
this famine of passion
in the silo of the blue guitar.
I want to place my life
like a feather of fire
on the mysterious altar of lunar rain
that splashes like stars everywhere
in the telescopic silvering of the well in her eyes,
and turn these deserts of space and time
back into grasslands
crossing her thresholds
in whispers of pollen and dust.
She walks into the room
to help me paint the bedroom walls,
as I try to cover the grafitti
of my vandalized soul with white,
and a dove in a cage
panics at her approach
before an open door.
She climbs the ladder in rags with a brush
like the moon over a lake,
behind a cloud,
through the branches of a leafless willow
and everything in the room
is enhanced by her shining
and I'm rolling new skies over
the scars and fossils of old stars,
worn faces with plaster patches
to rewrite the shepherding lies,
the myths and symbols of my solitude
in the sidereal headlines of her transformative light.
Now it's four a.m
and I'm pacing from empty room to empty room
like the pendulum of a heavy clock
that aspires to be a bell,
threshing words like wild rice
under an eyelid of peacock blue
to fill the empty hold of a buoyant heart,
the small boat of her hands,
with the eyes of a precious gathering.
And the tender snow falls quietly outside
on the crow limbs of the winter trees
like flesh returning to the bones of the dead
in a silent resurrection
more unsayable than a veil of white
that puts its finger to its lips
like an arrow of fire to a bow of blood
to hear what the hidden nightbird
under the eaves of a burning house is singing.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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No Gravegoods In My Solitude
No gravegoods in my solitude, no trinkets
from any spiritual world inside or outside this one.
The totem belongs to the dream that's buried with it
as the flower's engendered by the root it's taken from.
Mind is matter. Matter is mind. And it isn't as if
one is blind to the other because one shore
isn't parted from the other by the flowing
of the mindstream in between. Try to separate
the reflection of the moon from water in a dream state.
The moon is a characteristic of water as the water
is a feature of the moon. If you want to mediate
until you turn the vertebrae of your spine into a bridge
to get to the other side of a life you're already standing on,
that's ok as long as it's burning. Otherwise it's just going
to obstruct your path when you're shooting the rapids
of the Milky Way like your own spring run off
trying to saddle a rush of stars with a rudderless liferaft
and oars for spurs. Better to be a waterbird
with wings of your own, but what a thrill
to ride the snake until you can fly like a dragon
among the stars like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,
in the handle of the Big Dipper like a warrior Bedouin
testing his eyes on the dune of a tribal hourglass to see
if he can tell what hour it is by the dance of a distant binary.
It's getting late. Nightwatch at the well. The town
unpeopled by sleep. A choir of train whistles
practising their inquisitive requiems at every crossing
like Canada geese migrating south when the autumn stars arise.
More lonely than mournful, I can taste the shadows
in the honey of life as readily as the light. I can smell
the fragrance of time like the first snowflakes
in a lover's hair, trying to turn her into a constellation
to sweeten the night air. And even in the ashes
of the starmaps the shining sets afire
and scatters like a library in the urn of the heart
on a wind that carries away the passions of this art
of exhuming more life out of a shallow grave than went into it,
I can still burn in the dark like the ore
of undisciplined diamonds. I can still squander my light
on the eyelids of the fallen flowers like a final kiss farewell.
Time wastes a death on me. Years ago the wind arose
and blew that candle out in the open window
of an abandoned house and ever since I've been
drifting like a ghost of smoke in a diaspora of stars.
I bequeath to the rose, the blood of my wounds.
To the thorns of the moon, my scars. To the night
I leave my eyes. To the wind, my breath. My voice
to the nightbird whose longing put my lyrics
to the picture-music that's haunted me all my life
like the song of someone who loved me once
before I was born and began to forget. But my heart
that I could judge the worth of like a bell bound to the earth,
or a feather of fire in hell, in the palm of my hand,
I give that to everyone like the windfall of a tree in a storm.
Black walnuts and wild apples. Solar systems
of peaches and pears in the leftover orchards
of organic gardens bearing the fruit of a habitable planet
at the autumn equinox of the New England asters
and modest suns of the Jerusalem artichokes
for the birds and the squirrels and the bears.
You can't keep what you won't give away
and it's no good to you in a grave when it comes time
to throw yourself overboard to stay afloat
and weather the squalls on your own sea of awareness
like an empty moonboat drifting through the fog
calling out to anyone who'll listen on the coast
of a new universe that discovers you like Atlantis
to a ghost of the old world looking for a passage
back to the more familiar labyrinth of home.
Liberation is freedom through creative form, not from it.
Liberation is life. And life is all entrance, no exit.
And you weren't asked at the door for any i.d.
And no one's going to stop you from lowering the fire escape
to get away from yourself. And if you were to ask
the mirrors of your own awareness, they'd stop staring at you
as if they'd never seen a new world savage before.
Everyone's going to leave an empty chair at the table
sooner or later. Like the skull cup of the moon
you've got to pour your prophetic lees out upon the earth
if you want to give your abundance another chance.
You can make lanterns out of fireflies in canning jars
or you can abandon them to the spiders
in the corners of your eyes like dreamcatchers and kites,
but if you want to shine of your own accord,
albino fish in the darkest depths with stars in their eyes,
you've got to see the sun flowering at midnight,
you've got to greet Venus in the Pleiades at dawn.
You've got to unsilver the mirror like a stripper
until you disappear like a bird in the house of life
through an open window like a crack in a cosmic egg
to feel the vastness of the sky that transcends
the limit of your wings. Despite the eye-witness
in the mirror, where time is always in arrears to eternity,
you've got to give it all up like your shining reflection
if you want to stay here for your own protection.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Turn Out The Lights
I turn out the lights and lie down to sleep
and you open up within me like a lotus of fire
blooming in the darkness of a vast inner space
that has become my only skin, tattooed with stars
as I play solitaire with destiny, using your Tarot
of chameleonic constellations as a firing squad.
Little threads of joy and fear shudder through me,
revelation and lightning, fireflies going off,
the blasting caps of greater detonations yet to come,
and your face is before me, apparition and aurora,
the moon reflected on undulant water,
a jewel turning in the light of itself, blue eyes, full lips,
the blonde smoke of your hair on your cheek
disappearing somewhere as if a match had just been put out,
and your smile, your beautiful, wide, forgiving smile
that seems to flow from the warmest sugars
of an abundant heart; what dawn over a lake
has ever touched me silently like that?
One look at you and I am hurled into another more spiritual dawn
like a bird bewildered into singing by the strange joy
that threatens to consume him in the soaring radiance.
And though I cannot say you, you are the secret
I discern in the stars when they stop to whisper through the trees
to the bones of the holy man humbled on the hill
of his own insignificance; and then you are the only exaltation
that can raise him up again to shine above the night.
Always within me you summon like a bell; you
draw me out of myself like a genie torn from a lamp; my blood
heaves helplessly to the urgent clock of your tides,
teems with life and washes up on the shores
of mysterious realms where you are always the enchantress of the island;
what man or creature could I not become for you,
immersed as I am in the wine of your being? You are
the fullness of woman in the prime of her mystery, the vase of your body,
the shrine of a human divinity that generation after generation
inspires adoration from the brute
that comes, awed and shy of first fire, to lay pink tulips on the staircase,
grails and goblets gathered to be filled by the reeling honey
of your presence, the fire that burns without burning
and leaves even the wind love-sick and longing for ashes. Human,
you are five petals of fire; divine, one flower.
Break, then, if I must; in loving you, I'll break.
And should you never love me back and the air turn glass
and shatter
into a million splinters of emotion that settle at the bottom of the heart,
the broken wineglass, the crippled flower,
severed from its stem, or the moon,
scoured from its reflection on the eyeless river by clouds,
never know the laughter of your fountain, still
in every fractured piece of me
the whole of your face, in time and out, would shine
as it did in the dark before the light began. You are not a mirage
shimmering over vipers in these circumstantial sands
and I am not a candle in a hurricane. Though I love,
I know the world, its gardens and atrocities, its wounded doors
and urgent windows flowing with lace and longing.
It doesn't have much time for itself, busy as it is,
trying to hide the loss; it's looking for its eyes with its eyes,
its head with its head, its feet with its feet.
I've pulled the thorn from my heart, the worm from the rose,
the nail from my hand. I've gone mad and madder still,
looked up at hell out of the depths of my despair
and envied such exalted heights. And then it's all turned radiant
for no more reason than a dream, something nameless changes,
even as we plan a way into ourselves, or out,
suddenly an unknown light breaks through, and we have our eyes.
One moment of you, one firefly, in the vastness
I was falling through and galaxies ignited all around me;
the dead branch blossomed, the singing bird came
and the day was no longer a spoonful of ashes. Call it
what you will, pour it into any cup, plastic, crystal, or clay,
or drink it from your hands: it's still the wine, it's still the moon; it's still
always and only you that makes this confusion of stars and birds
in the treetops, this picture-music, this drunk dream, this tavern
that is an outcast's shrine to joy
raise a glass
to the sun in his blood that shines at midnight.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Hands Were Once
My hands were once the afterlives of birds
that caressed the cheeks of the sky
and brushed back the wind from its eyes,
and took a finger to intercede with a tear
not to start a pilgrimage without a little laughter,
and I am of the stuff of three stars
and a fire in my loins
that inseminated space with planets
and wrought red iron into bells of blood,
and leaned on calcium for ladders of bone
and taught the four-armed shivas of carbon to grasp life
and dance for the wheat and the grapes and the poppies,
and man lying down with woman
in waters urged by the fires of thought
furiously rooted in the gardens of the stars.
I am the ancestor and offspring of everything
and even my solitude is the loneliness of the mountains
sleepwalking over their own seabeds,
and the way I love, a trigger of oxygen,
and the way I see, a whisper of time and space,
a feather of moonlight dipped in the ink of the night.
I have within me,
deep in the vaults of my wounds,
swords from the wars of the grass and the trees,
and words that sang like arrows in the sacred groves
to answer why I live and what I'm looking for
and why all my foundation stones are shoes worn out with roads,
and who is it looking back at me like a dark echo in a dream
to see if I'm coming like a shadow with a voice.
And there are mysterious robes lighter than a breath of silk,
auroras and lightstorms, waterskins of the water-walking stars
that have plied themselves like the rings in the heartwood of a tree,
journals of light and rain, to sailor my spirit in a chronicle of flesh,
and be a brief thing in a brevity of eras, to know
why the tiger dies looking into the open, its eyes
yellow lamps in the bluing of the early morning
as if its death were already achieved a breath behind it
and a man crawls toward a meaning on his knees.
All the deaths are mine, the births, the names,
and my heart is the shrine of the moonrise and the dawn,
the blue honey hive of the stars and the wildflowers in their fields,
and the wind takes down what the mute rocks repeat for my sake,
and every face is a blossom or a leaf or an apple from the bough
of the orchard that seasons my emotions to advent and passage,
to the transformative oceans that drink to the bottom of themselves
and leave their empty cups on the moon to be filled again.
I have within me a beginning and an end
that open like the wings of a single gate
I passed through long before the birth of time
like the prelude of a world I hadn't read yet
because I hadn't finished living it in tears and blood,
running my fingers over it like the tender braille of a breast,
lapping it like blood from my own skull to see what kind of drunk I was.
And there are lifelines on the palms of everyone's hands
valleys, rivers, nerves, creases, roots, deltas, lightning
that together make a map to every dream I've ever lived,
all the tragedies and joys of fugitive spirits
trying to shoot the rapids with a broken oar,
and secrets that put a finger to the lips of the dead
like the horizontal threshold of a man who stands
like an infinite pause in the doorway of waking up
and just looks at himself with nothing special in mind,
a commotion of swallows in the radiant spoons of last night's rain.
But there's you now, who is not me,
because I long for you like a tide longs for its island,
and can find nowhere within myself the likeness of your face,
and though I know the water knows you like an ancient migration
it leaves no trace of your vines on the lips of its waves,
and there are skys where you shine among the stars for hours
where I've found threads of your shadow
torn on the thorns of the constellations
like rivers unravelled from your wilderness skin,
and even once I found your footprint like a boat on a beach
but you were not in it, and the emptiness was out of reach.
And I think if I find you, if I look hard enough,
if I stare into space as still as a lizard or a telescope,
if I check every leaf the doves bring back in their beaks,
every eyelid of snow that lowers the pines into sleep,
and lace the wind with fragrant spells and tragic pleas,
if I can break the code of the rocks that ore their silver secrets
like love-letters, like poems, deep in the throat of the earth,
if I grow new eyes for the seeing from the oldest wines of my being,
and the sky has to turn black forever not to have you pale like a comet,
not to lose you like a chandelier of fireflies in a galaxy,
not to reach out and touch you like the creatrix of the creator,
I can part from this life like a gift I left in the night on the stairs.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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So Lifetime After Lifetime
So lifetime after lifetime, sorceress of shadows and dreams
you step out of the dark wood of yourself,
a shy doe, a mournful lighthouse and a warning off the coast
of your infinite solitude, you, the singing bird
on the green bough of your flute pouring yourself
like sorrow over the eye of the sea, your tears,
the ancient wells of an eternal longing unanswered by the secret stars
that have entrusted their radiance to you, fireflies
drowning their light in your black candles,
the blind music of your lonely flowing. Is your flute, a bone, then,
and this rose I bring you, this heart, this blood
that has turned into a goblet of luminous wine,
drunk on the wonder and the missing in your phantom music,
is this rose nothing but a wound, a coffin-flower,
the unmarked grave of a mystic embryo?
Do you fear the tenderness, the meeting? Does the moon
strike at her own reflection in the mirror of her midnight waters
to wander like an orphan along her lifeless shores?
Boy and man, you murder me on the steps of your serpent shrine,
your eyes, cold glass, eclipses of crystal, your spirit
that once drew in the light like breath,
now a slow glacier, an age of ice
pushing your heart before it like a boulder,
like a temple-stone that one night flew out of the abyss
and buried itself like a meteor, a charred jewel, the demon seed
of a religion without saviours, your implacable creed
scriptures of blood in a mouthless book
that only love can open. Once there were swallows in the tree of life,
asylums of celebrants greeting the morning in their madness,
in the garden, in Eden, hurled through that first dawn
like a young girl's heart trembling like a dropp of light on a blade of grass.
Now your voice is a gypsy-crow on a dead branch,
your music, confession without atonement, your flute
without leaves, without orchards, an eyeless spring,
buried in its manger-cloth for years, nothing
but a crib-death, a broken wand, a phoenix
that has lost its faith in fire under the weight of its own ashes.
Beloved, again and again you kill me
in this dance of slayer and slain, tear out
this page of love like a like a child's tongue, like a mute heresy
you are doomed to rewrite forever
in the indelible inks of your seeing.
Do you dip your pen like a water-bird drinking
from its own image, putting out your eyes
to deepen the darkness, the scars of your sin
the lightless letters of a hidden language
pricked out on your skin, black stars and braille tattoos?
The pages and the years may turn like wings and hinges,
and a thousand deaths, all your own,
tome the field with gravestones,
breathless flutes and hollow bones, ancient futures;
and you the only mistress of those solitary realms; still,
your legend will remain moonless and sunless,
the story of a night sky, the eyelid of a black rose,
that couldn't break into light. Until
love stands beside the heartwell of another
as if it were its own sacred fountain,
one blood, one wind-mingled music
playing the waves like plectra, and raises the rim
of the single goblet to its lips and tastes,
only silence answers the terrible vastness,
only death graces the obscenity of these loveless wastes.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Out Here Alone
Out here alone so late at night
with all these spectacular stars
burning through the clean glass
of the freezing winter air
I can almost hear them thinking
behind the myths of the cover stories
they've told for years
dark truths about life and light
it would be madness in a man to understand.
Don't try to stuff the impersonal secret
of the universe
into your sentimental heart.
How could you ever fit its likeness
into a locket
and finger it lovingly as your own?
Out here alone so late
even if you have come
like a thief in the night
to steal from the light
when nobody's home
there are no cracks no facets no gaps
no backdoors, unlocked windows
or emergency exits,
no stairwells or entrances
in these jewels of insight
that can feel your eyes falling upon them
like rain running down a mirror
that shuts you out
like someone in the bathroom crying
for reasons that are light-years beyond you.
However deep and sincere your tears are
they're still only dry wells
in that vast ocean of awareness,
black snowflakes
on the roaring furnace of the abyss
and if you reach out with affection
hoping to make things better
by embracing it all
you're still only tendering a kiss
to the gaping jaws of your own lipless skull.
There's a silence older than space
in the bottomless heart of things
that makes intelligence seem
the unlikeliest of exaggerations
a human could ever mean
holding his mind up like a lamp to the stars
as if he could find his own way back by his own light
without the dream that themes his mindstream with creation.
But as foolish and futile as it is to surmise
or try to get a leg up on the wise
I don't think the darkness
is the negative space
around the troubled face that appeared
after all the dots were connected
like rising constellations
in a child's colouring book.
And I don't think there are gods
squatting like frogs
on the lotus of the world
making us up as they go along
like wheels and roads
to the grunts and groans
of an axial mating song
anyone could mistake for a joke.
And I don't think the stars
believe the things we say about them
or even remotely feel the mystic dread
of what it is to be a human
looking up at their shining
out of deeper darknesses within
where no direction can be given to the lost like eyes
that would never find their own way home again
were it not for the stars and fireflies that mislead us
from one illumination to the next
by giving the finger to the braille of the text
that would school a gust of stardust into us
like God gave life to Adam
and Eve gave life to God
long before there were any laws to blind them
like Satanic lightning bolts
uprooting their eyes like rain from the clouds
to put those fires out.
I look up at the stars
with the eyes of an exile
through the diaspora of my breath
and I want to think them all to death
like the people and things I've left behind me
when it was time to go my own way
anywhere into the darkness inside me
to see if I could shine a light upon myself
that didn't blind me to the fact
neither in the beginning
nor in the end
was I there to witness the act
that made a certainty as good as a doubt
to the great indifference
that wasn't trying to find me
like a needle of light in the heart of a haystack.
I look up at the stars
like a scarecrow in winter
trying to put its pants on
one leg after another
like a man
with nothing but time to burn
scattering his ashes among the stars
urn after urn
skull after skull
of the heretics and mystics
that were martyred by his scar-crossed heart
in the name of nothing real.
I don't know what they feel
but I look up at the stars
like a black rose
of blood and starmud
in the last death throes
of self-immolation
and see in my own image
what I've always had
in common with creation.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Stand Where The Listening Begins
I stand where the listening begins
as if my voice were just another one of the echoes
and my tongue were the tip of an edgy precipice
that doesn't dare make a move
over an immeasurable abyss of eyes
that nobody belongs to.
This is a seeing that's older than the stars
that were born of it
like a mirror is born of the shining.
Like a body is born of the mind
and takes on the shape of a universe
as an expressionist gesture of classical reserve.
In the great ocean of being before it turned into everyone
our eyes weren't beaded like two drops of water
strung through our nose
like a statement we were trying to make.
They were waves.
Waves of water.
Waves of light.
Waves of thought and feeling.
They were waterbirds that came and went
without leaving.
They were meteorological events
in the emotional life of the sea
when it played alone with itself like weather.
We didn't evolve hands to prove we had a grip on things.
We didn't evolve brains to prove we were intelligent.
We're not nuggets of insight
panned from the mindstream
that runs down the world mountain
in a rush of gold.
I stand where I can hear the night
breathing like a shadow in its own darkness
and whatever I am not
is as real as whatever I am.
And my sorrows dropp away
like the black fruit of ruined bells
and my joys know a freedom
no holy war ever deserved.
Here my death answers to my life
and not the other way around.
My beginnings are not justified by my ends
and my solitude is so wholly itself
it embraces everything
as if it were space
and time were its only friend.
This is a poetic state.
A dynamic mode of creative annihilation.
This is a phoenix blooming in its own fire.
This is life.
This is the universe full of bright ideas
that come to it like stars in the darkness.
This is the white mare of the full moon in the high field
with the gates open
like wings growing out of her shoulders.
This is a space that is so spontaneously immediate
that you receive the reply
long before you've even asked the question.
It doesn't take thousands of thoughtyears
for the light to get here.
A flower blooms.
A star comes out.
It's as simple as that.
You lift one veil of the mystery like an eyelid.
Nothing has a history.
The old man remembers nothing.
The old woman forgets her name.
Once they were seabeds of meaning.
Now they're just water.
And everything is ok with that.
People go grey
and turn into clouds in the mountains
just to catch the last of the light
and give their lives some colour.
And then it's night again
and the dancing chandeliers of the stars
that are burning like legends
to make a name and a myth for themselves
fall like constellations to earth
and shatter like the rainbows of youth.
Every dawn has a taste of the sunset in it.
What's the end of anything
if not the dark side of its beginnings?
I am the fool of a freedom
that lets things be whatever they want to be
deep within the heavy fruit of a compassionate heart
that ripens in its own lucidity.
There are worms.
There are birds.
There's a green star in the apple core.
My skin is the chameleon of the sun going down.
I know how to swim through stone and water.
There are fish in my treetops
and birds in my roots
and when I drown
it's the sun in the sea
and nothing ever really goes out.
Everytime I open my mouth to sing
this is where the muse
puts a finger to her lips
to teach me what I'm talking about.
I'm a star when I write.
First I let go of the light.
And then the children point fingers at me
and say in mutual recognition
of the stories they make up on the go
there you are
just as we foretold.
It's the same way with water
when it's lost in a desert of sand and stars.
Sometimes it takes a mirage to find your way home.
Death gapes like the jawbone of a mummy
and writes like a pyramid
as if it wanted to make all things last forever.
But when life picks up the pen
around the fires of the stars
to whisper into its own ear
things that only solitude
can suggest to the night
its poems are always tents on the move.
The moon sailing paper lifeboats down a river
like waterlilies
blooming in the pale flames
of their lunar immolations
as if each were a white phoenix
rising above its own ashes and smoke
like someone dreaming of swans.
poem by Patrick White
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I Wish Everyone In The World Were As Mad As You Are
I wish everyone in the world were as mad as you are.
I wish everyone in the world talked the same nonsense you do
and meant as much.
Stop crying.
I wish everyone in the world were as good as you are
and didn't lie to anyone else
other than themselves
about what the truth is.
You shape chaos to your mind
like light to space
to make a habitable planet you can live on
and if it isn't round sometimes
and O doesn't always cast the same shadow
that the others mimic with theirs
I wish everyone could put on your kind of airs
and be as good to life as the kind of atmosphere you are.
Come on now.
Here.
Dry your tears with this.
All those constellations you made up
out of the stars in your eyes
are your own private myths and mandalas
and you're free to change them as you will
and I wish everyone made as much
of the light they were given to go by
as you have.
I'm too much of a thorn
to paint the delicate iridescent watercolours
I see smeared on your tender bubbles
like original pictures of the universe
from a thousand spaced-out Hubbles
but I wish everyone in the world
had your kind of genius for vulnerability.
You hold up a single feather of light
like a candle among stars
like a green leaf in the middle of winter
and the world that is inured to three dimensions
for infinitely tedious reasons
would rather put its eyes out
and gape like blackholes
than see as you do
that there are countless seasons to the soul
that burn like a phoenix
and there's nowhere you can point to in the darkness
that isn't an equinox of love and understanding
when the sun shines at midnight
and spring harvests what the autumn sows.
Having a deep cosmic insight
like a stranger beyond lucidity
into the windows of the houses of your own zodiac
might make you look like a maniac to the neighbours
who keep watch in their asylum
against any kind of freedom
that might release them from their lighthouse
like a geni from a lamp
that doesn't conform to anyone's wishs but her own
but I wish everyone had the courage
you have not to be them.
Life isn't fair or unfair.
Life isn't kind or cruel.
It isn't half-Buddha and half-fool.
Neither impersonal
nor sentimental
life isn't a kind of obedience
to its own rules
as if it were bound like God to keep its word.
Or what?
Who else is there to answer to?
All the taboos want to be thresholds
and all the thresholds
want to run away from home.
Could be a curse.
Could be a blessing.
Could be just more idle words.
But you're not like that.
You're not a fountain mouth
that mistakes alphabets for birds
and holds them to the letter of the law
in a world full of music.
It's enlightenment to sing to a window.
It's ignorance to sing to a mirror.
But you don't sing to either
and your song is clear as running water
all the way down the mountain.
The picture-music
of your eyes and your ears
can already hear the ocean from here
that gathers to receive the flowing
like the heart receives blood
like the mind receives your thoughts.
Look out at the world.
You're the host.
Look inward.
You're the guest.
You can break bread with the dead
without being a ghost.
You can drink wine with the living
and it's the wine that gets high on you
flowing into a seabed of shadows on the moon
that hasn't touched a dropp for years.
Don't believe what the cynics say about innocence.
They have the sensibilities of blackflies
trying to draw blood from the Mona Lisa.
Don't grieve if you're a butterfly
that can't follow the flightplans of the maggots.
There's only a slight difference in wingspan
between a waterbird and a phoenix
but it would take lightyears
to measure a single feather of yours.
There's no cult of the rose
that insists it fall upon its own thorns first
or the moon draw first blood
on the blades of its own crescents.
You don't have to scar
your own deathmask with experience
just to prove you knew
how to eat the pain and bleed.
You don't have to wear your face in public
as if it were something you kept up your sleeve.
Dice might be the foundation-stones of the lost
but that doesn't mean
you have to go pearl-diving
for the moon in quicksand
or change your song like a jukebox
playing the slots
when you're a mermaid on the rocks.
I wish everyone had the same chance
to risk it all as you do
and win back their lives
like eleven come of seven
insteading of seeing everything
as if they were jinxed by inasuspicious birds
turning the wrong way on a prayer-wheel
that keeps coming up snake-eyes
with every roll of their skulls.
You can't heal the luck
of a wounded Nazi
by turning his swastika the other way.
You can't teach snakes to bite other people.
And you don't know enough
if there's anything left to say or understand
and even then there's a silence
that still longs to be heard
like a humming bird sipping honey from your ears
or deep in a telescopic wishing well of stars
burning in a dream of mirrors
they walk across
like fire on the water
or the distant blue notes
of the hidden nightbird
that echoes your tears
as if it were crying out in the darkness
from the safety of a secret place
for the same reasons you are.
As if it were trying to befriend its own sorrow
and weep for tomorrow as you do
for all the things of the past
it won't even know it's missing.
I wish everyone in the world
could live the future as you do
as something that is already happening now.
Even when you're crying
because you don't think you're brave enough
not to.
You're not a lame princess
that anyone needs to rescue.
You're a dragon bringing rain.
And if the snakepit hisses at you
like a social structure
and calls you insane sometimes
because you have wings
and they still hug the earth
all tied up in knots
taking their poisons out on each other
to keep from feeling anything
it's just their way of defining sanity
by the standards of the numbest.
It's not you that's crazy.
It's not you that's the dumbest.
I wish everyone in the world
were as warm-blooded and wise as you are.
When the serpent fire at the base of your spine
has passed through the doors
of all your chakras like vertebrae
and you're already a circumpolar constellation j
just a little off true north
shining like Draco
why worry if you're no good
at the game of snakes and ladders
they play like politics and religion back here on earth
to see who gets to be the pillar
and who the quicksand.
You understand way more than that.
I can tell by the fire in your eyes
that you're a phoenix among stars
and you've transcended the eagles and the houseflies
that can't even begin to imagine
the kind of heights you can reach to
or the depth of the view below you
when you're riding your own thermals
like beautiful helices in the mindstream
for the sheer joy of being only you.
Even now.
These tears
that run all the way down to your lips
as if water had fingertips
what are they
but the way you cry for things
that everyone else didn't?
I wish everyone in the world could be like you.
I wish you could teach us all
to stop living a spiritual lie
on the deathbed of an earthly truth
as if that were the only way
to foolproof ourselves
against reality
like a stranger looking through our windows at night
who doesn't recognize herself in us
because most of us aren't as brave and free as you are
to leave the door ajar
and let whatever wants to come in
come in.
Some track in mud.
Some.
Stars.
And the mud flowers in light.
And the stars bloom in fire.
And one looks up
and the other looks down
on each other's likeness
reflected in the other
as if they were engendered by the same being.
Sight is a kind of love
and I wish everyone in the world
were inspired by the mystic dimensions
and intimate clarity of your kind of seeing
that even through these tears
that I'm not having much luck in wiping away
can comprehend a world
that's more wonderful than it thinks it is.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Cocoons
Weary of lies and the soap operas of fruit on the verge
of their due dates, weary of men and women and breezy friends
with smiles like illegal fishing nets across a river, bored
with the multiple personalities of stale bread growing pools
of blue-green bacteria like a bad imitation of the moon, the people
who landed safely from a long way up
but drowned in their parachutes, the earth-bound
curb-worn excuses that never learned how
to park a star without getting burnt; and nowhere to go
with all of this unspooling of an old documentary
that isn't me anymore than the echo of a diamond is;
sick of approaching the vital signs of every oceanic dilemma
with the heart of a well, the mind of a winch
and the balls of a bucket, without malice
and I repeat it, without malice
because my mind is not a shoe full of interrogative scorpions
and my blood has never gone white long enough
to call itself an ice-age and there's always a clown
to warm things up with sad defeats and comic thawings
and most things are just old bottles in a barn anyway,
tired of witching the watersheds of mystic sublimities
that are always flying away like herons startled in the moonlight,
or stars with the eyes of fish, lovers
washing the doves of their hands in the blood of a rose,
jaded by the black translucencies of hell
that smell like cordite and lightning
and leave ambivalent messages on a storm-coloured mirror
lustrous as the eyes of a horse from a paid familiar
amused by the fool he courts, I write this
to no one in particular knowing it's a way out of the stone
I'm swimming through like ore, a dream key
to a cormorant fountain of elegant transformations
that haven't been born yet, faces that return from childhoods
yet to come, roads to go down that aren't roads
until I walk them, all here now in the lifespan
of a heartbeat, singing like sirens of oxygen
to seduce the wind away from paler tresses
and rattling windowpanes. Little matter
who the return journey is if it ever gets there, finds its way back,
there are fires along the way so intensely
beyond the last farms of colour
their serenity is their fury
and all this world of discernible form
in the light of that light,
a pilgrimage of shadows. And by that, do not think
there is a secret eclipse up the sleeves of flame
that rise from the candles of my adoration
because it was the world in the profundity of its playing
that lit them in the first place to celebrate
the way it hides from itself when anyone's looking
and the way it looks when anyone hides. So I hide my wave
in the water and hang my fleece in the sky
on the branch of a dangerous star tree
to test the nerve of the neophyte sailors
who come from ports like me that are
no more than a dropp in the bucket
of all there is to be. Now everyone is an effusion
of this nullity, the creative efflorescence of a cosmos
suggesting dandelions and dishevelled magnolias to the dark,
releasing black cherries and bells of deadly nightshade
to wander the forsaken labyrinths of the moon,
or shaking chandeliers of water out of the light,
worlds within worlds, fire harps in tears, and the brief urgencies
of the eyes that put them out flung out over the grass like silver seeds
in the way a dog shrugs off a lake, in the way
I've just emerged from the palace in the rock like a sullen metal
stapled to a wound in a tight-lipped corner
of a memorial shrine to unknown spiders,
and looking up at the stars rinsed out of the willow's hair
released myself from this web of torn horizons
by handing out cocoons to everyone for free.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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