The Voices Of Dead Friends, Departed Lovers
The voices of dead friends, departed lovers
aimlessly feather the night air like the fragrances
of wildflowers and burning guitars thriving in the dark.
I'm out to see the Delta Aquarids down by the river,
leaping like a man with faith in his precarious footing
from skull to skull like a chessboard of oracular rocks
keeping their heads above water like a half-hearted bridge
dog-paddling in its own collapse, trying to cross
the same mindstream they're in up to their eyes
for a better view of the sky in the clearing on the other side.
Clouds of cometary junkyards in decaying orbits.
Placental remains of unilluminated afterbirths.
I delight in watching how wasted things shine the brightest
on their way down like blossoms of paint
flaking off the windows of heaven like rose petals
revealing these thorns that gore and slash the night
like matadors and meteors with razorblades
hidden under the screening myths of their eyelids.
It's natural when opposites come together,
enjoining disparate elements into more enduring alloys,
it's the clarity that seems confusing to the untrained eye
and chaos that foreshadows transmorphic reality.
All my aspirations emanate from the same radiant
like sudden cremations in the upper atmosphere
that disintegrate and flame out upon re-entry
like Icarian candlewax at the black mass
of a waning eclipse factualizing the omens
of its own self-fulfilling prophecies of subliminal descent.
All the matches I strike like fireflies
and phosphorus flower buds against my heart
are put out by the same bloodstream
they once illuminated like wild columbine
and the hydrogen blue of the star clusters
burning like irises along this highly siderealized river.
Meteors. Two an hour. Bayonets of light
making the rounds on the nightwatch.
The tree line blows through the open window
of the wavering lake like an old curtain
about to be shed like the veil of the Queen of Heaven.
Indigo the eyes of Isis. With a white wavelength for a smile.
Here where she gathers up the severed hearts
of the light's dismemberment like body parts
she heals by leaving the waterlilies on all night in the morgue
and staring so long and immaculately
into the darkness like a lump of coal
for the third eye of a spiritual snowman
washing his hands of himself like a pilgrimage
weeping diamonds all along the way
like the excruciating tears we all shed
in the shrines of the black suns that rise at midnight
like broken mirrors from the graves of dead metaphors.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Related quotes
Never Alone With A Candle
Never alone with a candle
a firefly in a valley,
a star above the hill,
is your seeing less beautiful
than that stranger in the mirror
who takes you by surprise?
Can you hear your eyes
your eyes your eyes your eyes
falling like rain
on the plectra of the flowers?
Is that a coffin or a harpsichord?
Scarlatti playing the columbine
or the midnight requiem
of a dolorous pine longing
for a nightbird that never comes?
I can sense you count yourself
a dandelion among delphiniums,
a brown star without solar flare,
a moon with a complexion of coral,
and even from here I can hear
that happy bell you wear
like your heart on your sleeve
to let people know you’re coming,
and either fake it or leave.
Fashionable mirages of make-believe.
Black roses of mascara
with comets for eyebrows,
their noses stuck up in the air
like the wrong end of a telescope.
Born this crude ore of a man
what can I know of a woman’s feelings
moving around inside of me at night
like underground rivers of gold?
But, sweetness, if I were to guess,
there are stones much more lustrous,
more polished, more shapely
than even the linghams and yonis,
unenlightened cosmic eggs
with nothing inside to reveal,
no stars, no jewels, no chandeliers
of sad insights into dark mirrors
of what’s inconceivably real
and what’s merely the fossil
of an extinct species of fish
trying to swim through brimstone.
Does the sea envy its waves
because its ambient eyelashes
aren’t long enough to paint
a black velvet masterpiece
signed by a cosmetic line
of flash in the pan movie stars?
Isn’t it enough the moonlight
adorns your eyelids like a lake?
I haven’t touched a woman’s breasts yet
when I didn’t feel like a sailor
lost at sea without a lifeboat
in an ocean of heaving roses.
And I’ve slept with enough women
to know beauty isn’t only skin deep.
Sometimes it’s a shipwreck on the bottom.
Sometimes it’s a blood diamond
on the black market of a cheap eclipse
that bleeds out like haemorrhaging slaves.
Sometimes it raves like Medusa
at the snakepit of a hairdo in the mirror
that turns her reluctant heroes into stone.
You weep for this? You curse your body
your lips, your nose, your legs, your thighs,
the white-out of your smile, your eyes,
your hands for not being doves,
your hair because it doesn’t flow
like long blonde tresses of honey
from a hive of killer bees,
because you don’t think
you can please Adam well enough
with the apple you hold out to tempt him?
Ask Majnun about Laila,
it’s not the goblet, it’s the wine inside,
and from what I know of night and desire,
I’ve never met a man
who wouldn’t drink from his own skull
just to taste it like a mirage in an hourglass
or a message in a bottle on the moon.
Don’t judge the potency of the elixir
by the popularity of the flower
it’s taken from like a love potion
nor the strength of the poison
by the dowdiness of the snake.
And I don’t say this waxing insincerely
like the false dawn of a consolation
for something you’re austerely missing.
You’re not a nun among flowers
about to take vows
of silence and celibacy
because you don’t know how
to attract bees to your cult of one.
You’re not a black mass
with a rose petal on your tongue
instead of the thorn of the moon.
Why do you desecrate
the vases and urns of the wildflowers
that bloom like New England asters
in the starfields of your windowless room
like the prophetic heads of the dead
because they’re not sunflowers
or waterlilies and wild irises
in full bloom along the banks
of your cresting mindstream?
Why do you pass the hours
snuffing fireflies out in your tears
like a constellation of match heads
on the sill of a broken windowpane
in a misbegotten house
of a wayward zodiac for rogue stars?
You’re not a calendar of scars
marking time with razorblades
on the bone of your wrist
like some Neanderthal
who’s just discovered time
because there’s no view of you
scenic enough to cut out and save
that isn’t nicked by crescent moons.
Have you not seen the envy
in the eyes of those first magnitude
fixed stars showcased
on a starmap, jewels under glass,
butterflies pierced through the thorax
for the garishness of their wings?
Take a look for yourself.
Do you not see
how deeply they envy
the beauty and freedom of fireflies
who’ve gotten off the grid?
It’s not just the light that’s beautiful,
it’s what it shines upon as well.
That’s how the flowers talk to the stars
in the same universal language.
Not as lesser avatars of shining
but as one beauty to another
in an alphabet of loveletters
they leave unsigned, unaddressed,
for anyone who wants
to walk in the moonlight awhile
neither in nor out of style,
as beautiful in their own skin
as the auroral silks of the northern lights
or the moon a vaudeville stripper peeping
through the boas of the clouds
when that’s all she’s wearing
like a changeable wind, a radiant sky
revealing and veiling simultaneously
the bright vacancy of one side
and the dark abundance of the other
more intriguing face
she’s turned away from.
The one you can easily see
on the other side of your own eyes
when you turn the light around
and let the mirrors labour to perfect
the artless beauty of their reflections
by imitating you like a ballet
in the feathered death mask of a swan
learning to move with the beauty and grace
of someone flowing
like a river on the moon,
a white Taj Mahal reflecting
the pale towers of a torch
that burns like stars and lilies
in the black waters of its dark opposite.
Ask any Luna moth at the window.
it’s not the shape, colour, scent
of the votive candles or fragrant lamps
you’ve devoted to your solitude
that draws them in out of the night.
It’s the intensity of the light
that summons them to you like seance.
Ghosts, poets, lovers, artists all alike.
The way things are here, not
as they seem to appear and disappear
like fireflies in a mirror
but as they are and will ever be
the translucency of stars by night
the clarity of flowers by day,
the sun shining at midnight,
the moon keeping its shadows a secret
from the occult powers of noon,
all the beautiful shapeshifters,
all the moody chameleons,
each with a face of their own
as unique and revealing as the universe.
In every dropp of water
the depth of the sky
as in every tear an eye
that can see straight through you
to the beauty within
when you’re as easy on yourself
as a starfish on the moon
a dolphin with stage fright
on the catwalk of the stars
changing wardrobes like weather,
night seas of habitable planets
wholly at home in the mindscapes
of their luminous atmospheres,
their immaculate waterskins,
as they are in the rags of those mirages
you keep drowning your radiance in.
A constellation in the desert
that’s underwhelming itself
by forgetting that fire knows
how to swim in the deep end
of shadows on the moon
like the flame of a candle or a goldfish
even you for all your tears,
your weeping willow chandeliers,
your wishing wells, your watersheds,
your shaded windows, your broken mirrors,
the torn nets of those dreamcatchers
you gouged the eyes out of
like semi-precious jewels
that didn’t measure up to diamonds.
Even you, for all you relinquish
of your native beauty to comparisons
with the costume jewellery of other eyes
than your own, try as you might
to unfeather the plumage of the moon
you could never extinguish,
you could never eclipse or blow out,
no more than you can hold a mirror
up to the dead like a portrait of smoke
and convince them beyond
the shadow of an unreasonable doubt
it’s a simulacrum of your solitude,
though it looks nothing like you
sitting alone by a candle in the nude.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
The Maker
(daniel lanois)
Oh, oh deep water, black and cold like the night
I stand with arms wide open
Ive run a twisted line
Im a stranger in the eyes of the maker
I could not see for the fog in my eyes
I could not feel for the fear in my life
From across the great divide, in the distance I saw a light
Of jean baptistes hes walking to me with the maker
My body my body is bent and broken by long and dangerous sleep
I cant work the fields of abraham and turn my head away
Im not a stranger in the hands of the maker
Brother john, have you seen the homeless daughters
Standing there with broken wings
I have seen the flaming swords
There over east of eden
Burning in the eyes of the maker
Burning in the eyes of the maker
Burning in the eyes of the maker
Oh, river rise from your sleep
Oh, river rise from your sleep
Oh, river rise from your sleep
song performed by by Emmylou Harris
Submitted by Lucian Velea
Vote! | Copy!
Something Deeper Than Stars
Something deeper than tears to weep for you.
I weep blood. I weep the silence
on the backstairs with the screen door
that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping
all through the night at the slightest gust of wind
as if a constellation were trying
to strike up a insightful conversation
with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.
I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.
I need to dance the pain away
in a sword dance of serpents
that know how to carry a tune
like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,
straight to the heart of the mysterious apple
that's sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.
No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows
returning to the budding tree in spring,
no green leaf of an innocent tongue,
not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn
writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,
not even among ghosts, can find a voice
that isn't already the dead language
of an absence that can't be adorned
by a seance of words.
I light no candles. I summon no gods.
No pretence of knowing where you've gone.
No black hole that's as empty as
your ring on the table, no halo
that ever fell as far from heaven.
Good-bye's too optimistic and farewell's
the rudder of a grave on the rocks.
And if I were to raise the paper sail
of another poem like the waxing phase
of the funereal moonboat
that carried you away,
I'd make it black. I'd raise it
like the shroud of a black magician
that can make things disappear,
like an eclipse at half mast
and patch it with the skull and crossbones
of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.
I wouldn't return your personal belongings
back to the morning like starlings and doves.
But there aren't enough sacred syllables
swimming like moonlit fish
in the watershed of the silence
to open this fountainmouth of grief
like an aviary of flightless birds.
Nor would I risk having you remember me,
and turn around like a false start,
supposing you can still recall anything at all,
like a light you left on in the hall
the night you left home for good.
You were magic while you were here to work it.
You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.
You were the black mass of the sun at midnight
and the blood sister of the moon
that nicked your finger
on both her crescent thorns at once
so one was the cure to the other's wound
like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.
Given how close to the moon you were
it didn't come as a surprise
when you started writing me loveletters
inscribed in bone as if you'd just invented
a whole new language out of your claws
to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon
didn't lay its silver sword down between us
to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.
And it wasn't long before the elixir began to work
and I lost count of the number
of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,
similitudes for the night skies
that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars
that revelled in the crazy wisdom
of their mystically inspired atmospheres.
As just as beautiful as they were,
so were they irresistibly dangerous.
How many light years now
have I poured this memory of them
like a love potion over my roots
and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream
like stars and blossoms streaming
through the heartwood of an ageing tree
that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,
and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,
knew you weren't coming anymore,
and the night bird had no one to sing for?
But, hey, I'm still a better seance
than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me
calling the faithful to prayer
in all directions at once like a paper airplane
the boy in me has sent out to search for you
like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,
dripping with clusters of blood
the size of hemorrhaging grapes,
fireflies caught in a spider-web
of starless constellations that aren't a sign
of anything except I miss you worst at night.
If you could sense the tremor
in even the slightest wavelength of light
I'm trying to shine on the darkness to find you,
I'd write you a holy book of sacred silence
inspired by the shadows in my blood
that overtake me like strangers from behind
with an urgent message not to return home
to what isn't there anymore.
I'd sit out here all night by myself
beside the black waters of this night creek
unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,
that's been talking to itself
as it walks in its sleep on the water,
and I would beseech the stars with my eyes
to let me know if they've seen you,
and in my heart I would entreat them
with the solo of a wounded wolf
raising its head up in a wild prayer
to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,
to give me a starmap to when and where
I can see you face to face again
and touch your eyelids in your sleep
like crocuses coming up through the snow.
Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm
that scattered us to winds like all these poems
I've tried to write for you ever since
as if you were still somewhere nearby
like another pair of eyes
in my pain and my solitude
watching from the woods
the stars, the water, the moon,
under the stones in the river
that mark your grave and name
above the flowing of this endless epitaph
of leaves and blossoms and poems
as if you alone could still read them,
like the comings and goings,
of waterbirds on the moon,
the first draft of words on the wind,
maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,
and still understand what I was trying to mean.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
If Only I Could Remember Things For Awhile
If only I could remember things for awhile
as they were before they changed. Savour them.
Let the flavour of the jewel
that's been ripening in my voice
wash through my mouth
like the mystic blaze of a star sapphire
and every word I say be a firefly of insight
that can shed some light on dark matter.
Would that my tears fell fruitfully enough
to feed the world, that one dropp of my blood
after years of preparing the potion, were enough
to immunize a whole planet from affliction.
And what marvels would my eyes not delight
in showing anyone, if they could astonish the blind
like an orbiting telescope that's just had
its cataracts removed
like the reflection of the moon peeled
like an albino eclipse off the black mirror of the lake
only to discover that all this time they groped through the dark
like star-nosed moles, it was their own face that got in the way
of what was shining. If only my hands
knew how to build like the birds
and my bones were strong crossbeams and rafters,
what palaces of light and water and air
would my heart not offer to the homeless
like the growth rings of a maple tree
that threw them the keys like winged samara
and said, move in, its yours. It's built on bedrock
not the quicksand cornerstone of a slum lord.
For the lonely sitting with their cats and their elbows
in half-opened windows, observing
the pigeons and the stars for memorable events,
I would break this long fast of my solitude
like black Slavic peasant bread with strangers
who sat above the salt at the table
as my honoured guests, and ask them, eye to eye,
heart to heart, all ears, as if I were a radio telescope
listening like Seti, if they've heard any news back yet
from Bellatrix or Rigel, and which
of Jupiter's shepherd moons is hiding
a secret affair with life that everyone's dying to know.
It's heart-breaking that we can't all bring our tears to bear
into one cloud weeping over a drought like a dry creekbed
where we're all hibernating in our own starmud
like toads and frogs waiting for flashfloods of the next rain
to underwhelm us like gravestones in a makeshift cemetery.
What would the world be like if we could
walk up a long country road at night far from ourselves
and not have to ask the roadkill for directions in life?
As if we were sure enough where we were going
to risk being followed by the lost like a starcluster of fireflies
within the compass of everyone's bearings, not
out there somewhere like the ghost of a spaced-out lighthouse
but like the porchlight of nearby farm on a summer night
that draws living things out of the dark like the full moon to it,
even if it just be gnats in the air, bats, or Luna moths,
what a seance of life we could be to each other
as if we left the screen door unlatched
for any lunatic of the light on the road this late at night
who might wander in like the seeds of new themes on the wind
to enrich the bright vacancy of our dark abundance
with a starmap to where our buried treasure lies hidden
like diamonds in the ore of the hearthstones of our hearts.
If I could take the whole of my darkness
and enchant its snakepits into the wavelengths
of the light I would have emanate out of me
like the rainbow body of a Tibetan rinpoche
entrusted with the wisdom of the Himalayas
to seek a low place among the stars like a sea
that all things flow down into like the shining images
we retain of ourselves like the reverberations
of experienced luminaries echoing
like seasoned birds to each other
in the valleys and black holes of tears and death below.
Sacred syllables of immortal butterflies
in the orchards of morning and moonrise.
I would shine down upon the abyss of the lovers
like a water star from the bottom up
of all the burning bridges they have yet to cross
like Aldebaran at zenith, or Cygnus at nadir,
to get them to the other side
of what binds them to each other
like water and air, light, earth and fire,
and each moment of my life, every step
I risked anew, I would become the way
that's never taken itself before this deep into the mystery
of what it means to be alive and everywhere
be endangered by the beauty of our own awareness.
Instead of breathing for the dead as long as I can
underwater on the moon, I would invite them
to make a new birthmark in new medium
that calls them back from the night like light
from the scattered ashes of the empty urn of a star
coming together again in a gravitational womb
of their own remains, where everyone achieves
the all consuming illumination of their endless afterlives
by opening the koan of a single flower
in the light of their darkest hour of perennial insight.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
The Willows Adorned By The Return Of Their Old Hair-Dos
The willows adorned by the return of their old hair dos.
I've been mud-mashing my way down to the banks
of the Tay River lately through the primordial ooze,
now that the weather's turned round, just to feel
with an overly sophisticated sense of childish anticipation,
Venus bright in the apple-green gloaming of the swallow-swept air,
as if I were playing with fire again, the flaring
of the wild irises of the spirit burning hot and blue
as hydrogen in the heart of a needle-shaped flame
that can see right through me into what goes on
behind the curtains of my theatrical third eye
when I come like an amorous arsonist,
bearing bouquets of dried flowers
I've pressed between the pages of a matchbook
as a token of an old love affair I'm annually immolated by.
Not as a martyr who takes things lying down
but as a heretic who does his time standing up at the stake,
though I've always been a little suspicious about the heroism
implicit in that. Even in the fires of hell
I've tried to avoid posturing. But there again, you see,
I'm assuming a virtue I may not have, I'm blooming in fire,
I'm shooting clowns out of cannons without safety nets
as the heavens come down around me like the circus tents
of the empty envelopes of day old loveletters
who've lost the scent of what made them so flammable
in the first place. Just because I'm waiting for wild irises
to break ground along the banks of the Tay
doesn't mean I'm not a spiritual disgrace
that's as hard to fathom as a shipwreck
in my oceanic consciousness as it is
to see myself raising the skull and crossbones
like a condor among the angel fleets of heaven
at anchor in home port just to give them a good run for their money
like the wind in an orchard in bloom
impatient to get beyond the first fragrance of things
and taste the fruits by which everyone of us shall be known.
Either that. Or I've got more of a river nature than I thought
and that could explain why I'm always talking to myself
like water in passing that no one's listening to
in these solitudinous out of the way places along the river
I seek out like natural shrines in the woods,
trespassing against obstacles in the way of my pilgrimage
securing its footing on the bones of those underfoot
laid out like crosswalks and the rungs of ladders
stepped on like thresholds that stayed well within bounds
as you would expect any mystical stairwell addicted
to its spiritual vertigo like a Sufi at a crossroads
dancing with a dust devil of blue hydrogen stars
into ecstatic annihilations of satoric fireflies
who clarify the afterbirth of their clouds of unknowing
by sitting still as constellations on contemplative waters, to.
Besides, everyone's got their own way of dealing with metaphors
to render the chaos of experience communicable
through some intimate form they can spend their whole lives
trying too hard to relate to as if it knew who they were
and were simply waiting for the right time
to let them in on the secret that it knows
nothing more or less about what it is or you are
than you suggested to it in the first place
when you began to take yourself too mysteriously.
I see a red and black baseball cap floating down the river
and right away I think of a decapitated tiger lily.
A fire someone put out too early to catch on and spread
like a spiritual conflagration of heretics
through the alphabetic birch groves of the Druids.
Does that mean whatever rises from the ashes
is thereafter struck dumb, deaf, mute and illiterate?
The counter-intuitive grammars of free association
are thenceforth to be demonized and burnt as witchcraft?
If I await the coming of the wild irises with poetic devotion
and the offshoot of my daydreaming to pass the time
is to see the eddies in the water like the tendrils
of wild grapevines trying to get a grasp on things,
couldn't that mean that life playfully suffers
the same highly suggestive visual imagination I do?
And did its ears come late to the party as mine did too
and crash it as usual like an egg a crow drops
on the skull of a river rock anointed by the sun,
beaten away by the irate broomsticks of the sparrows,
because there is more instinct in swimming upstream
salmonwise against the flow of your own thought
on a return journey more dangerous than the first
than there is in painting watercolours
from the back of a hearse when it's raining?
But don't try to answer that question with your eyes open
unless you're used to seeing things in your own light
and waiting for something as I am wild irises to bloom
like the sagacious fires of female dragon muses
on the dark, unmothered side of the moon
I'm seasonally inspired to sacrifice myself to
on the altar of a river rock that sticks in my imagination
like a vow of the voice in my throat
I made to the river as much as myself
never to let its beauty lack a messenger
that couldn't speak in the tongues of the wild irises
without tasting my own ashes in the blue fires
of what they wanted me to convey
with a passion for extinction to the clouds and the stars.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Coming Out Of A Blue Funk
Coming out of a blue funk, this seal,
under a sky thickening like sheet ice all day
has found an airhole it can breathe through for awhile.
Been wondering about my life. What
it's been doing to me for the last fifty years
for the sake of poetry, for the sake
of pursuing an earthly excellence
though it hardly matters why anymore.
I used to have an answer on the tip of my tongue
when I was young and thought more
with my mouth than my heart. Less so now.
Time, death, suffering, love and the devil,
certain intense realms of creative bliss
attuned to the dark harmonies of hidden roots
that flow back like the delta of a river
to the watershed of a single dropp of water
that got it in its head to do something big with its life
and turn something trivial into the sublime.
Did not the sun and the moon, the whole of the sky,
fit it like skin? And that was just the outside.
It would take more than light years to measure
the wingspan of the abysmal spaces within.
Even time would run out of itself
before it got to the end of anything.
My life in art has been like keeping a fire alight outside
in a rainstorm of tears. To see clearly
through windows that thawed in the heat
of looking through them with the compassionate ferocity
of a crystal skull poured out of a terraforming meteor impact
like a prophetic lump of coal, a diamond in the rough,
that refused to burn in the furnace to prove it had the right stuff
to shine like a star, no one could follow, on its way to somewhere else.
Not a sign post. Just a sign. Your eyes
once you see it, are never going to be the same again.
You won't look at a starcluster like the Pleiades
as if you were waiting for the traffic lights to change.
You'll take your three and a half pounds of brainy starmud,
like a meteoritic kissing stone, a falling star,
and run it through a diamond tipped bandsaw
and discover the jewel of life that's been glowing
in the core of the ore since time immemorial
like a dna molecule wasted on space
that transforms the medium and the messenger
into a voice, free of content, that's the whole of the message.
I walked out to this dark, deserted place, redolent
with the duff and detritus of life, the flotsam and jetsam,
where the half life of the rate of decay of my insights
into your heart, eludes being used as an atomic clock
to determine the agelessness of either of us.
I came out to look at the stars but I've been startled
by the photonic discharges of your bioluminescent fireflies
ever since I started looking up like a starmap to make sure things
were where they were supposed to be. One moment
you get in my eyes like the sandstorm of a mandalic power painting,
a masterpiece of the wind, and the next,
I can feel the intransigence of your vulnerability
dyeing your hair like a comet to attract the attention
of the sun at midnight looking for asylum from a black hole
where it's third eye used to be.
You're a mermaid on the rocks of Andromeda singing to a telescope
to look up to see how far its got to sink in an ocean of stars
before it hits bottom like a shipwrecked moonrise
gone pearl diving for habitable planets
that can say I love you and mean it like an atmosphere
it's not going to lose again. Only in the Braille
of the scars on your heart so far, but I can read your pain
like the glyphs of an Aztec temple
I'm still clearing from the jungle of my indirections,
that recorded in imported stone how many times
it's been torn out to please the gods with a kidnapped sacrifice
worthy of the priestcraft in the sacred abattoirs
of modern drug cartels when you're too susceptible
to feeling too much, the same as me, when I'm thinking mythically
about what I've endured to be acceptable in my own eyes
that might shine across these aloof distances like a star into yours
that lights you up from the inside like an intimate familiar
whispering into your ear like a dream grammar of sacred syllables
that have liberated themselves from the syntax of the stars
just to speak subliminally in the same sign language as you
like the chaos of fireflies I see in the black mirror of my mindstream
bending space like the surface of a lake at night
where you can hear the echo of a loon ululating
like the wavelength of a mysterious love song
among these dark hills shapeshifting in the moonlight
toward you like a mirage of picture-music
emerging as something real in this wilderness of transformation
like a new constellation of fireflies I want to overhear with your heart.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
The Maker
Oh, Oh Deep water
Black, and cold like the night
I stand with arms wide open
I've run a twisted mile
I'm a stranger
in the eyes of the maker
I could not see
for fog in my eyes
I could not feel
for the fear in my life
From across the great divide
In the distance i saw a light
Jean baptiste
walking to me with the maker
My body is bent and broken
by long and dangerous sleep
I can work the fields of abraham
and turn my head away
I'm not a stranger
in the hands of the maker
Brother john
Have you seen the homeless daughters
standing there
with broken dreams
I have seen the flaming swords
there over east of eden
burning in the eyes of the maker
burning in the eyes of the maker
burning in the eyes of the maker
burning in the eyes of the maker
oh river rise from your sleep
song performed by by Dave Matthews Band
Submitted by Lucian Velea
Vote! | Copy!
And Should I Recall Whose Eyes
And should I recall whose eyes made the stars most beautiful,
and set the mindstream that flowed though us aflame with fireflies
a moment there and gone and come again like light
in the keyholes of the feral cats that prowled the graveyardshift
wholly to the top of the broom-swept path up Heartbreak Hill,
where the bones of the seven hanged men lay buried
in the duff of our childhood legends, a shadow and a name,
trying love on shyly like new clothes in the shadows of the pines,
where we lay down with the dead on beds of rusty compass needles,
out of sight of the windows of the town, how could I not feel,
here alone now by the Tay, thousands of miles away,
and more years later than it takes to walk a burning bridge,
waiting for the flower moon to appear above the horizon,
the waterclock in the nightbird's song of longing?
And if I were to say what it was like to be touched by her
when she was brave with hunger and my body
all loaves and fishs in the innocence of her hands
and her breasts and lips magic mushrooms without the flies
that swarmed the garbage cans in the back-alleys below,
and though it was not wise to begin a new life
on the last night of the past we were ending together,
like a bell and a cannon that had been melted down
from the same dark ore of a life we were cut out of
like a wound in a loveletter we left unsigned for one another,
because good-bye was harder to write than just to let things go,
what words could I use that weren't already
denuded of their shining like a windfall
of black dwarfs on the windowsills of time,
and the stars that night that clung to the sky
like bubbles in the evanescence of glass
or the grass to our flesh, all washed off now
as if they were grime, the quiet patina of time
gilding the dust like rainbows on the wings of flies?
And the wind asks, and the water sylphs want to know
and the wild willows are holding their breath like a veil
and the Tay is pulling a curtain of water aside in its wake
to hear about another stranger the earth swallowed
like a sacred syllable in the mouth of a snake
that envied the waterbirds their wavelengths and wings,
and though the skeletal birch and prophetic skulls
in the riverbed plead like the end of a dream
for one more lullaby in the ghost story of the moonrise,
I show them the black pearl of my heart
lustrous as hard coal to burn again in the furnace of dawn
on the dark side of the moon in partial eclipse
as I weep like a dragon for the secrets I keep
like myths of origin in the urns of things that are gone
like the irrevocable flightfeathers of the words and waterbirds
under the lost petals of fire that bloom in the eyes of the flower moon.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Unbuckle Your Heart
Unbuckle your heart, undo the luggage strap.
Wash the smell of old lovers out of your laundry.
Sow the dreams you've carved from your skull
like dice in sacred ground
and let's see what springs up.
There's the bathtub you can renew
your virginity in, and there's a corner
you can stand your bass guitar in
like an Irishman at his wake in a coffin.
And there's the garden for that persona
you took on the road like a scarecrow
for a travelling companion with a limp.
All the flowers taste of hummingbirds.
And it's ok the raccoons come for the corn
like second storey cat burglars in the night.
They never take more than they need
and in a world of greed, that's integrity.
I always leave a smile ajar to let them in.
But with you, my heart's an open doorway
the moon's standing in, and my blood's
a transfusion of black roses into the occult.
My eyes, a rare conjunction of fireflies
that won't happen again for another hundred years.
Doom can spend all the time it wants
messing with its calendars to co-ordinate
the apocalypse in all zodiacs at once
so the year of the rat and the year of the swan
don't synchronize their prophets to the dawn
like waterclocks who think things are
just going to go on and on as they always have
like imperially inclined aqueducts without a rupture.
Eclipse, millennial poseur, you're a lyric of carbon
that makes the diamonds flow like tears
to realize there's galaxies of white sweet clover
more to you than appears under the cloud cover
of a hundred billion stars burning into the silver nitrates
of the photographic plates I take of you
in the humbled mountains of my all night observatories.
And even at this distance, alone in the cold company
of these one-eyed telescopes, I'm tempted
to cross your event horizons into your black holes
and see what worlds might come of us
on the other side. Throw caution to the wind
like a rodeo clown and take the ride
as if you were not too wise or wild for tenderness.
Even when you hurt I've seen how you wear
the corona of the sun so lightly in full eclipse
all the haloes shining by a reflected glory
seem mere brassy moon dogs by comparison.
Out of fury you insist upon your originality
like a gamma ray burst in the path of the earth
as you weave your interlocutory wavelengths
into the flying carpets and labyrinths
of an alien cartographer mapping out the stars
with your third eye open to the loneliness of beauty
and how everyone's threatened by an intelligent orchid.
I imagine sometimes you're almost as unloveable as I am
when I'm at my best, when I've been accurately blessed,
not too much, more or less, beyond my aspirations
and I see at the speed of light how time stops,
and my mass and volume become as infinite
as my body and mind, and everything
is perfectly inconceivable in a fallible eternity
that's adapted to us like the medium of a mystery
in a graveyard of dead metaphors we keep giving
new meaning to as if we were all randomly immortal.
Are you the supple bubble of effervescence
in a tsunami of sorrow that could keep my spirits up,
or a methane moon waiting for an airlift of oxygen
to light you up. You're too incandescent
to shine like a brown star, too imaginatively immense
to be a black dwarf. Are you the omnipresence of a particle
or the oracular wavelength of an apostate saint
when no one's looking but me and you
through your holy books to see if what we said
came true or not? If we kept our word
to the innovative absurdity of it all in peace and war
or threw the moon through the window
like an alarm clock that didn't go off in time
to save the earth? I know you're not
the existential bricklayer of the paradoxically sublime
outside the gates of Babylon, nor the whore within.
I've seen you wing your way from one planet to the next
trying to thread your lifelines into a nest
that wasn't a begging bowl in the hands of tree
that came on like a slumlord in a ghetto of birds.
There are no aviaries for the hopelessly free.
But could you live with me in this homelessness
like a tent in the wind that scours Mars for survivors
of the last expedition of seeds that tried to bloom here?
I'd build you a palace of black water that eclipsed
the beauty of the Taj Mahal and plant stars
all around it that would fountain into waterlilies
and we'd be so full of moonlight and solitude
in the silence of each other's eyes, the darkness
couldn't help but envy us the danger of the enterprise.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Eyes In The Shadows, In Blood, In Space
Eyes in the shadows, in blood, in space, incubating the light
that has yet to be born, wild asters in the deflowered fields of death,
and the return of the living out of the eyeless abyss, delinquent,
and a redness in the air of this September night,
saturating it like a deep wound it holds under its breath,
a black rose, a fossilized thorn that no longer grows old,
memories fixed like crucified bats to the sticky brown stars
of the fanatical burdock trying to wear me like a starmap
as if every day of my life has felt like the approach of autumn
watching the constellations turn like the pages of a calendar,
a waterclock of new moons flowing like dark matter,
sundials at midnight encircling me like shark fins
slashing the water like sabres with surgical precision
and their eyes, oblivion, a focus of shadows, perennial night
after a supernova of dismemberment, dehumanizing horrors
in a hydrodynamic abattoir. Spirits of old root fires
smelling of pine and cedar at large in the dark like hunting magic.
And the clouds a wolf pack of shapeshifters among the stars,
the exhilaration of spiritual wariness out in the woods alone at night
where it's unwise to trust anything too beautiful at first sight,
and a sudden flash of inspired self-destructive courage
to do just that in protest of the abuse of beauty as a Venus fly trap.
But it's not hard to tell a real muse from a false one
because a real muse never wastes her passion on the sane,
and if there isn't an occult side to a poet who works his madness
like a medium in the dark he had to sacrifice his eyes to see
beyond the visuals of the retinas and the cameras
with lizard eyelids that blink like guillotines, into
these visionary realms where galaxies are shed
like the feathers of migrating swans, gravity's gone,
and if you want to go up, you've got to go up without a parachute on.
Mystic physics. The illogic of the heart delighting
in the absurdity of itself just because it can and you can hear
a sword master of black Zen singing his heart out in a brothel:
A good heretic never disciplines his disobedience.
The brutal moon offers me the cup of my own skull
and says drink, and I know it's death to hesitate
because you lose control of everything in the moment
if you do, so I drink it like an elixir of dark tears
from the eye of the shark in eclipse, and I peer
into the black mirror of a midnight lake to see
if I'm still alive or dead, and the mirror breaks
like the unleavened bread of a gnostic gospel in my hands,
wholly enraptured by a spell I wasn't ready to wake up from,
and I can feel the lustrous radiance of a light
so inconceivably darker than the one I go by
like a shadow of that, the ferocity of the clarity
immolates my heart with a terrible joy
in a prophetic furnace of hot diamonds
that howl like the insights of a firestorm of dragons in extasis
breaking out of their cosmic shells like stars out of the void
shining out of the dark heart of things within
like eyes seasoned by compassion
for the low hanging bells and fruits of the earth
trying to express the infinite solitude between birth and death
where we walk alone together forever with everyone
and everything, like pilgrims sleepwalking
in the unattainable dream that animates us all
to keep on divining the inspired limitations of the impossible.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
I Woke Up Saying Your Name
I woke up saying your name
but in the course of the day forgot.
I should have forgiven you sooner
but my tongue was a noose and a knot.
I should have let you fool my eyes
but not my heart. No Grecian urn
but just the same
I loved the shapely vase of your body
and the fact that my ashes weren’t buried in it.
But those bouquets of angry snakes
you kept trying to arrange
into a Zen garden in Kyoto
or a hair do in Mycenean Greece
kept me looking for an antidote for years
to all those estranged wavelengths
of a gamma ray burst
I stood like a nuclear meltdown in the way of,
though I poured my blood out like heavy water
to get you to stop and cool down.
What it is is what it is only
if you don’t factor in what it’s not.
Otherwise, in the bigger picture,
what it is is just as much what it’s not.
And who can assess
what didn’t go down between us?
I’m sitting on a cold rock down by the Tay River
freezing my proverbials off
because I like being alone with the stars
at three in the morning
because they don’t ask for an explanation
about why I’m up so late
so many light years from home.
And they don’t ask me to translate my scars,
the dead word into the living,
back into wounds
they couldn’t relate to anyway.
And I don’t need to tell them
if you’re going to open yourself up to someone,
if you’re going to bloom, if
you’re going to shine
a rose, a star,
you’re bound to taste your own thorns
or the splinters of broken chandeliers
on your tongue, or a dog
with porcupine quills in its mouth,
howling at the dark side of the moon
as the greater of two faith healers.
Though neither the stars nor I
are into comparative mortality.
And as I approach death and love aimlessly
looking at the stars timelessly alone
I don’t bemoan my brevity anymore
and they don’t flash their eternity in my face.
There’s just stars and eyes for awhile
and both of us agree
death and eternity are none of our business.
There’s just this little bit of heat and light
that flares like a matchbook for a minute
and then goes out
like a holybook, a firefly,
a poem or a flower
burning in its own ashes, smothered
in its own smoke like a pillow
over a dream in a skull
that effaced itself like stars
packed into a snowman that thaws
according to cosmic laws
not meant for our eyes only.
And God, the Zeitgeist,
the Universal Id knows,
how we’ve both tried
to enlighten these lumps of coal,
these sorry excuses for eyes
into diamonds that flow
with love and compassion.
How we have laboured like Sisyphus
to haul what’s deep underground,
the dark ore within us,
up into mountains of light
only to watch it run down again
rivers and rain
into the great night seas beyond
like a heart-mind continuum.
A leaf and a starmap on a lifestream.
We have advanced into our retrogression
like everything else in the universe,
big heavy methane planets
with shepherd moons
that cast their shadows
like beauty spots on Saturn,
and our axes toppled like Neptune’s.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Scouring The Patina Of Time Off With Stars
Scouring the patina of time off with stars
the way I used to grind pyrex plates
with varying grades of carborundum
down into telescopic mirrors, then silver them
with a vapour of aluminum to add
to the luster of their parabolic eyes.
Been looking into the darkness so long
I'm beginning to shine on my own.
Now from moment to moment
there's as much darkness coming out of the light
as there are black holes sand-blasting
the hour-glass shape of this bubble of the multiverse
with firestorms of desert stars as I make my way
from one oasis to the next where the mirages
wander in out of the night to drink
from the reflections of their own faces
with hands cupped like the hulls of leaking lifeboats.
I don't believe a life of delusion is any less painful
than a life of enlightenment, even if
your scarecrow self is finally standing naked
under a full moon that's come to realize
that an orbit isn't the same as an enlightenment path
that can loop back on itself like a snake or a shoelace
or the retrograde motion of Mars, without
wandering off the road you were meant to walk
because that's the way you went. Give them both
sixteen ounce gloves and let reality
have it out with delusion in eternity
like two siblings of the same dark mother
trying to get some rest from the racket
after giving up on interceding
by putting some distance between them
light years out of earshot of the nightbirds
that have been longing for her return ever since.
Even the first bliss of the blossoming of illumination
grows sad if it's not wholly shared like an orchard
with everyone as the wind turns around like a fist
flowering into a more open-handed approach to life.
Enlightenment is in everyone like a wavelength
is in a particle when no one is watching.
And if today you're an angel in a coma of ice
tomorrow the diamonds will fall out of your dark halo
and slowly thaw you out as you get closer to the light
like a comet plunging into the sun like the vapour
of a bridal veil you've finally shed like a snakeskin
that had to come off like the white-out of the eclipse
you were living, to see the stars that were rooted
in the darkness within emerging out of your own starmud
like waterlilies and larkspur and the peony buds
of the remote observatories on cold mountaintops
breaking into life like planets at a suggestion from the ants.
Stations of our perishing, perhaps. Phases of the moon
topping my skull up again like the cup that she drinks from
with the crazy wisdom of the lunatic she takes for a companion.
First crescent after the crone. Death's door left ajar
to let a little of the light out for those of us
who like to walk down long country roads alone at night
brindled by shadows, runged by black flames
like ladders of prophetic fire with nothing left to lean on
but the event horizons of their own imaginations
exploring the inevitable exits and entrances
of the passage of life like a waterclock of stars
descending the dark stairwells of the night with the maple keys
to the secret cellars where they age the best wine
by letting it stare into the dark so long
it begins to shine like a blind dream with a light of its own.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Compassion Is The Sweetness That Enters
Compassion is the sweetness that enters
the wounded apple of knowledge after
you've taken your first bite out of it.
It's not an antidote to the facts of life and death.
And you should know by now if you've suffered at all,
and it's impossible not to from the moment you open your eyes,
the night is not a reward, nor the lantern of the light
that goes before you on a graveyard shift of the stars.
Compassion is the oldest instinct of the heart
and first muse of the mind that can taste only
the blowing blossoms and bitter green apples of the spring,
gripe brain, before it ripens like a sunset in your blood.
That's why the heart knows more about it than the head.
And I expect, on that basis, no one is more capable
of loving us who must doubt that we're worthy of love
to live up to the truth of it than the dead who can open
the tiny koans of the seeds at the core of things
like the lockets of fortune-cookies that break
like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to spread their wings
like waterbirds who write the lyrics of their songs on the fly.
Words for the eye. Words for the ear. Words
for the voice of the wind like black walnut trees
and kites in a storm. And if you really know how to listen,
I mean if you can hear the wavelength of a black snake
swimming across your blood like a mantra
of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that keeps its secrets
to itself, or hear the unfathomable oceans in the black rose
whose petals and eyelids are always smashing
like white eyelashes in a squall of sunbeams
against the breakwater of a white dawn that passes
like an albino eclipse in a moonlit leper colony
of extinct black rhinos. If you even remotely
hear what I mean when I speak like this sleepwalking
through a dream grammar like a prophetic skull in a trance,
words that dance like light on the mindstream
rejoicing in the clarity of the voice that expresses
the hidden message encoded in the genes of the fireflies.
You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.
Some like lighthouses along the banks of life.
Some like thieves with searchlights for eyes on a bomber's night
when everyone is underground and the bummers are out
plundering the evacuated houses of the zodiac.
Might be the ravings of a star struck maniac talking to himself
to make sure nobody else is listening. Might be
the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist night bird
singing out loud in its sleep for things it doesn't know
it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is waxing prophetic
in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying to sound his way out
of the mountains without end he's being trying to befriend
like a cloud or an eagle silvered a moment
like the ore of a dream in the corner of the eye
of a moonrise coming on like a hurricane
with a black pearl in its teeth. The eclipse of a sacred lie
compassion concedes to an alibi without a myth of origin.
Compassion is the child of imagination that identifies
with its simulacra of suffering by applying the heart
like a bloodbank to the wounded eidolons of eyeless images
that didn't know how to bleed, or breathe, or cry or see
until compassion tempered their impression of themselves
as paradigms of rationality, by shedding real tears
in an ice age of lenses that kept their illusory distance
from the stars that came out after the rain, wet and shining,
laughter radiating through our tears, because life isn't a dry fire.
It's the hand on the rudder of a lifeboat
that keeps you from drowning from the day you were born
in the undertow of the tides of the new moon
until the night of the full when you haul everyone aboard
who's been swimming through glaciers of tears
like baby mammoths for the last twenty-five thousand years
afraid of extinction if they ever stopped to catch their breath.
Compassion is accepting everyone's death as a portion of your own.
Everyone's life as your third eye, a vital organ of your own body.
Compassion is an undisciplined action of the heart.
Compassion arises like a moonrise of inspiration
in the eyes of the older sister of the muses
who walks too much alone as if she'd devoted her solitude
to the suffering of a wounded stranger she met along the way
when she let her hair down like willows of rain
to cool the scorched earth and slake the roots of pain
until they bloomed like foxfire in the shadow of her passing.
Most poets sit around the lesser fires of their art
trying to divine the smoke of what's burning in their hearts
like autumn leaves they've heaped into books
that smoulder in tears more often than they break into flames.
But if compassion turns her eyes toward you
like a star in the darkness beyond your blazing
the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream through your veins
and you see in terrifying clarity the great mystic details
in the deep watersheds of picture music efoliating
like wildflowers and galaxies, grails, fountains,
lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off the ground
to take their place among the shining, radiant with life,
in the low valleys and high fields of an imagination that heals.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Crazy Man Dancing With Fireflies
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
Another one trying to shoot out the stars.
I hear the woman next door weeping again tonight.
I don't know what for.
Desire's a phoenix in love with water
if that's what it is.
The torch is plunged into the wound
to stop the bleeding
and the ashes get carried away.
I've loved nine women for years
and they've all buried me in a different place.
Or saved my skull to consult the dead
about a future that wasn't living up to the moment.
The white poppy of the moon
bats her eyelashs through the pines.
I've never been as innocent as a cynic
nor quite as susceptible
but I remember the pain of separation
like the mirror of the lake remembers lightning
as the most brutal of all its revelations.
And how you can walk in and out of some doors
all your life like faces
without ever opening them
or knowing whose they are.
Everybody longs for the threshold they haven't crossed.
Poor stars trying to live up to their radiance.
Wondering why it's always behind them.
Why the dreamcatchers never get finished
and love ends up like some kind of cold fish
swimming through endless windows.
Music from far across town
this late at night
like a ghost answering a seance.
It rises above the trees like smoke
and disappears into the moonlight.
Someone's trying to bloom in fire.
It happens but it's rare.
I take a firewalk down memory lane
but all my cremations seem no more to me now
than the shadows of candles
and though I feel intimately removed
this afterlife of mine is not scar tissue
whether things got over me
or I got over them
no matter.
Attachment too is a Buddha activity
and though passions that once
made even the trivial sacred
and the impossible slight
have transformed
the hot blue flame of their hydrogen
into the carbon and oxygen
of more sustainable intensities
the selflessness of my impersonality
is not aloofness or indifference or exemption
or the consolation of wisdom won by acclamation.
Time distills the spirit out of all things human
and you can delight in your past
as if it were the future of someone else
who lives it like the unfolding
of leaves in the spring
that shadow the ripening apple
until it tastes like the tears of the autumn sun.
Joy and compassion
and the lucid spontaneity
of staying improbably ageless
again and again and again and again
as the years rejoice in the young and old alike
climbing the ladder of the tree
from so far down in the dark earth
they're beyond the reach of its ancient roots
and the utmost of its aspirant branchs
scratching at the windows of heaven.
And then most amazing of all
someone comes to the window
and parts the veils
and like the last line of the last act
just before the curtain call
you fall.
You fall toward paradise
as if you'd failed
and had to do it all over again.
But if your heart needs healing
offer your love up like a transplant
to anyone who can use it
and your mystic eyes to the stars
that want to see through them
what their light looks like
from deep inside
the expanding vastness within you
that can hold all that shining
like the sky or the sea embraces
all kinds of its own weather
without ever overflowing the brim.
The skull you drink from
like a wishing well
in the desert watersheds of the dead
is a cup without a horizon.
A real mirage with imaginary water.
A seabed of shadows on the moon.
Low-tide at noon.
Providential midnights when it's full.
But if you don't like
what you've been hearing about yourself lately
when you stop to listen
to what your saying
and don't recognize the voice
you're speaking in as your own
hold your ears up like conch shells to the oceans
that have never heard a recording of themselves
and carefully watch their faces.
And if you make the same stupid mistake
you swore not to make again
learn to recycle your ignorance
so you can save a bit of wisdom
for the rest of the world
to remember what it was like once
to be alone in Eden
with no one else to rely upon
and all you had to add
to the conversation of the rivers
that flowed out of it
all you had to share with your solitude
and boundless emptiness
was your unanswerable longing
even as it was being shaped
by their waters
into the form of the unimaginable.
Into the form of a woman
who tasted then
and tastes forever now
of the original light
of spontaneous creation
however many worlds
and lives and years and nights had to pass
before you first saw her
and felt your afterlife condense into a star.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
And it doesn't matter
there's no one here
to understand my delight.
Crazy man dancing with fireflies.
It's hard to read me in so little light
but when you fall asleep
it's the world that dreams
and though I feather the wind
with firebirds of desire
and write loveletters
long into the night
that grow like the graceful tendrils
of ink dissolving in water
whatever the sign of the season
there's no bitterness in the vine
and no departure in the reason.
Though I'm a leaf with the wingspan of autumn
even in the dead of winter
the phoenix is green
and by late summer
there's a crazy man out dancing with fireflies
down by the Tay River
who is too carried away
by the picture-music
of what he hears with his eyes
and sees with his ears
of all that he's been and will be
alone together with everyone forever
in love and out
full cup and empty
eclipsed and forgotten
or charged with the radiant urgency
of fireflies after the rain
to care what any of it might mean
when they fire the valley up for a moment
like blasting caps in a beaver dam
that's flooded the road.
And everything's so nimble with light
so vital and effusive with joy
so mysteriously near and always
all darkness all pain all sorrow
all that's lost and weary
and fearful of ever being found again
of being loved or despised
is absorbed blameless into bliss
like a tender intimacy
into a great vastness
that lives within us all
even as we disappear into it
like the sky in the heart of a bird.
Or just before the soft flare of moonrise
through the leafless veils
of the glowing birchgroves
on that far hilltop
where the pioneers
used to bury their boys with a view
a night just like this
as illusory as it is real
suffused with a spirit of water
that heals the wounded swords
the bruised flowers
the fevered promises
that are offered to it from the bridge
between this shoreless delirium
and the next.
A presence that's always flowing away
like a mindstream among the stars and fireflies
with the power of time
and the effortless wisdom of change
that makes the going stay
and the perishing persist.
A night just like this.
A momentary kiss
that keeps faith
with the eternal flames of the fireflies
that adorn the darkness and waters of life
with indefinable joy
in the exuberance of the mystery
and unspeakable trust in the onceness of forever
and an abiding intuition
that even the fiercest thorns of pain
that have tasted first blood
and greyed the hearts of their lovers
can never be estranged
from the beauty of the rose.
A night like this
The great abyss
lucidly alive with its own shining
and a woman's eyes
and a crazy man dancing with fireflies.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
I Will Get There
Ohohah
Hey
Yeah
I've been wanderin' 'round in the dark
Been lost somewhere where no light could shine on my heart
I have known a pain so deep
But I know my faith will free me
[Get there] And I'll get through this
[Get there] I'll find my way again
So don't tell me that it's over
'Cause each step just gets me closer
[chorus]
(I will get there) I will get there
(I will get there) I will get there somehow
Cross that river (Cross that river)
Nothing's stoppin' me now
I will get through the night (Oh, yes, I will)
And make it through to the other side
(Get there) Get there
(Get there) Get there
I've been in these chains for so long
I'll break free and I'll be there where I belong
Hold my head up high, I'll stand tall
And I swear this time I won't fall
[Get there] I will do this
[Get there] No matter what it takes
'Cause I know no limitations
And I'll reach my destination, I will get there
[chorus]
I will get there (I will get there)
I will get there (Ooh) somehow (Somehow)
Cross that river (Cross that river)
Nothing's stoppin' me now
I will get through the night
And make it through to the other side
(Ooh, get there) Get there
(Get there) Get there
Well, the night is cold and dark
But somewhere the sun is shining
And I'll feel it shine on me
I'll keep on tryin', I'll keep on tryin'
I will get there (I will get there)
I will get there somehow
Cross that river (Cross that river)
Nothing's stoppin' me now
I will get through the night
And make it through to the other side
Get there, get there
I will get there (I will get there)
I will get there somehow (Somehow)
Cross that river (I'll cross that river for you)
Nothing's stoppin' me now (OhwhoaI)
I will get through (Through) the night
And make it through to the other side (Ohhoohho)
(Get there) Get there
(Ooh, get there) Get there (Whoaoh)
I will get there (I will get there)
I will get there somehow (Somehow)
Cross that river (I'll cross it for your love)
Nothing's stoppin' me now (No matter what)
I will get through the night (I will get through the night)
And make it through to the other side
(Get there) Get there
(Ooh, get there) Get there
Get there
Ohhooh
I'll get there
song performed by by Boyz II Men
Submitted by Lucian Velea
Vote! | Copy!
If Compassion
If compassion is not
the fruit of your understanding
your tree is rootless and flawed
however beautiful the blossoms are.
And your eyes may be as lustrous
as polished stones
you've buffed like the moon on water
but there's nothing inside
and gold doesn't pour like dawn
from the dark ore of your suffering
when you cry.
If a child is shot in Gaza
and you don't bleed
for the evil seed in her head
as you would your own
then only the dead will sow your field
and you will gnaw the hard bread
of your own gravestone
like a book you should have read.
If compassion is not
the fruit of your understanding
however much is illuminated
by the rarity of your perception,
the lamp you go by
is still not ripe,
you're still a green apple
on the bough
in autumn.
The tongue is a shovel
and knowledge is soil
and you can use it
to dig a grave for your brother
or prepare a garden
as it was meant to do
and your words can flower
into fruit and bread
at the eastern doors of the dead
who will raise the sun up to their lips
and drink from it like a cup,
but if all your heart can do with blood
is jewel the eloquence of the blind
with lucid insights
then your siloes are nothing
but the empty thunder
of lightning without rain
and you will reap the sand like the scythe
of a crescent moon
that's never tasted grain.
And you may be a glutton,
you may stuff yourself day and night
like the liver of a goose
with spiritual insight
and squat like a rotund buddha on a tatami mat
squirming through the wormholes of your mind
to the other side of the universe
or knock like a xylophone
on the door of the last chakra
above your skull
like an embassy
you seek sanctuary in
but if you can't feel
the fangs of starvation
that withers a child
in the arms of her mother in Darfur
who gave birth to a lily
that will die like a bat
because the dark matter
in your cosmic frame of reference is fat,
then the advancing flame of your snakefire
is just another lethal candle
for all the charm of the choir
you can't train not to bite you.
If compassion is not
the fruit of your understanding
you will be disgorged
by the wiser serpents of life
like a black hole turned inside out
and thrown from the back of the truck
like the corpse of a sack of flour
in a refugee camp
and your blood will spoil
like the unused oil in a lamp
that never threw a light on anything.
You have a mouth,
but you won't scream murder,
you won't scream genocide
when you know what's being done.
You have a nose
but you pin it like a clothes peg
to a breezy clothesline
to sweeten your dirty laundry
by washing out the stink of the corpses.
You have eyes
but you keep them shut
to paint pictures on your windows
from the inside
to see what you want to see
in your house of warped mirrors
and if you should cry to look good
in front of the camera
you're prompted by a gland of TV tears
to cologne the air with cliches
that smell like the petals that fell
like the machetes of Uganda.
Rock-bands making radical money
whining about nothing,
wanna be killer bees
trying to make their honey sting
inside the hive of a contract
with plug and play guitars
and fireworks that swarm the stars
like chimney-sparks from Auschwitz.
You have ears.
But they're dead shells
and the sea you once listened for as a child
has been poured out of them
like living water
so you can't hear
your daughter
being raped in the Congo,
or the scream of the boy
who died like a toy-soldier
when the Hannibal hearts
of the cannibal generals
played war-games with his life.
If compassion is not
the fruit of your understanding
you will lick your heart
like a lump of coal
you tore out of your own chest,
trying to taste the diamonds,
and you will know what it means
when the eyelids of the light
close in upon you
like a starless night
that undoes the seams
of your wasteband constellations
like the stitches and staples
it uses to sew the children
back together
in a patchwork comforter of wounds
it will lay over your head
like a sky for the dead
all reds and gangrenes
as the faces of the children rise
one by one like ghoulish moons
and apple blossoms
to stain your death
with their foolish dreams.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
The Loneliest, Most Protean Modes Of Madness
The loneliest, most protean modes of madness
rage in my cells like nightmares in isolation
watching the fireflies dance through the bars
as a secret gesture from unknown, sympathetic stars
in a collusion of constellations to keep up with the times
and shuck off their old myths of origin
like the straight jackets of a fixed place,
debate whether the light-bending darkness is chaos or freedom
or the old heirarchies of seraphic emanations of insight
still trickle down like oracular snakes on burning ladders.
Now if I wanted this to mean something
I'd look for a precedent for the shadows that dart like birds
across the tunnel vision of my line of sight
and I'd drink from the same fountain where the leaves
lap their water like books full of experience
and I'd borrow light years from other men's eyes
to verify my seeing may be new, but it's sound.
I don't have any use for knowledge
and that's why it trusts me and let's its hair down
as if there were nothing of any significance to impart
to the diamond-hearted translucency of an engaging madman
whose enlightenment sweats the details
in a fever of crazy wisdom that plays with his mind
like a child on the moon fascinated by the solitude of its intensity.
But you who can hear me in your blood without asking
will recognize me by the accent of light in my voice
and know that I don't walk in the footprints of grammars
that wore down this trail like a carpet that wouldn't fly away
until they got as far as they could vocally could
then turned home for good, as if that were the end of the tail
that began and ended like alpha in the mouth of omega.
But time sweeps eternity away like a waterclock in a deluge,
like chalk on a blackboard, a ferocity of jewels out of the eyes
of bitter ores that couldn't see anything shining in the dark
by their own light like a fish out of the reach of the sun,
that became a lantern unto itself, a revelation
on its own wavelength that illuminated the depths
of a darkness deeper than light years are far
and there's no way to divine a sign in the immaculate darkness
for a teacher or a star. Here where the ladders don't reach
and there are no reflections of a higher clarity
all senses are intensified into one medium of perception
that doesn't individuate the morphology of knowledge forms
your mind holds up like a black mirror to a chaos
of hidden harmonies that depend inexhaustibly upon you
to add your voice to a new species of seeing,
like a mutant gene that's never been heard from before.
Even in a cage, my humanity is what's measureless
about all things if you enter them deep enough to understand
you can't drown in the mirage of your own emptiness
or badger the stars to break their vow of silence
without giving yourself away like a secret
everybody's been keeping to themselves like tears
under their breath, in the wells of their heart,
in the dessicated watersheds of their art
with nowhere to fall but up into the nights within them.
The unattainable aspirations of a madman grasping at fireflies
like the cornerstones of a new palace of stars
that dance like chandeliers in the rain
to the timing of their musical visions in the night.
Among the journeymen who labour for lasting results
I do with great discipline exactly nothing,
masterfully done. And the picture-music is undeniably
perishable. I burn colours in the sun on a pyre of hawkweed
like the works of a dead chameleon evaporating
like a rainbow body that isn't making promises to anyone
you'll ever hear from it again, though mantras
echo through the mountains like the shrieking palettes
of wild birds revoking the ease of the nocturnal silence
with more vivid mixes of the hues in the eyes of crazy wisdom.
I make great leaps of disbelief into the abyss
off the ledge of a lover's precipice into the emptiness
and my heels flower into wings and it feels
as if I'm departing at last like a hermit down a mountain
with a contemporary vision of my own empty immensity.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
A Shooting Star Flew By One Night
A shooting Star flew by one night
I wished upon its burning light
I wished for love to fill a heart
For love taken away in the dark
A Shooting Star flew by one night
I wished upon its burning light
My wish was answered by you and you
Who would have known the love of few
Would grow to heaven’s blue
A Shooting Star flew by one night
I wished upon its burning light
A knight in shining armor you might not be
A protector with strength and love you have given me
A Shooting Star flew by one night
I wished upon its burning light
Your love for us you have not failed
You took our hands and rode the Shooting Star’s tail
A Shooting Star flew by one night
I wished upon its burning light
Although I wished for many more
My love for you I will always adore
A Shooting Star flew by one night
I wished upon its burning light
May heaven bring us Peace
Your love for us will never cease
poem by Anthony Wayne Parran
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
No Frontiers
If life is a river and your heart is a boat
And just like a water baby baby born to float
And if life is a wild wind that blows way on high
And your heart is Amelia dying to fly
Heaven knows no frontiers
And I've seen heaven in your eyes
And if life is a bar room in which we must wait
'Round the man with his fingers on the ivory gates
Where we sing until dawn of our fears and our fates
And we stack all the dead men in self addressed crates
In your eyes faint as the singing of a lark
That somehow this black night
Feels warmer for the spark
Warmer for the spark
To hold us 'til the day
When fear will lose it's grip
And heaven has its way
Heaven knows no frontiers
And I've seen heaven in your eyes
If your life is a rough bed of brambles and nails
And your spirit's a slave to man's whips and man's jails
Where you thirst and you hunger for justice and right
And your heart is the pure flame of man's constant night
In your eyes faint as the singing of a lark
That somehow this black night
Feels warmer for the spark
Warmer for the spark
To hold us 'til the day
When fear will lose it's grip
And heaven has its way
And heaven has its way
When all will harmonise
And you know what's in our hearts
The dream will realise
Heaven knows no frontiers
And I've seen heaven in your eyes
Heaven knows no frontiers
And I've seen heaven in your eyes
song performed by by The Corrs from MTV Unplugged
Submitted by Lucian Velea
Vote! | Copy!
And The Willows Down By The Banks Of The Tay
And the willows down by the banks of the Tay
whisper through their veils
like ladies of the lake
where autumn walks like fire on the water
or the marriage bed of a Viking funeral ship
as the sun goes down like a ferry
into the underworld of the west
and all these words of passage I say like birds flying
high over head with the souls of the dead
I lay down like swords in tribute to the river
as if I were returning tears to the mirrors they came from.
Maple leaves scratch like the quills of bat-winged scholars
at the parched manuscripts
lying everywhere at my feet
trying to trace their ancestral bloodlines
back through a lineage of zodiacal kings
while the Library of Alexandria burns.
All scholars are arsonists at heart
as flammable as naphtha in birch bark.
If God were to talk to anyone now
right here in Perth Ontario Canada
it would still be through a burning bush
that would sound like the voice
of the phoenix in the sumac.
Mystic immolations of an Arab spring
spreading its wings for a poet or a prophet
to jump up on Pegasus or Buraq
and fly as if you had a star under your saddle
and not a spur or burr of discontent
that makes you feel tongue-twisted and petty
beside abject comparisons with Icarus and Aaron.
Stars soon to add some glamour to the sky
as the willows turn their weeping veils
into the shawls of grieving widows.
I’ve got nothing in particular to cry for
but I admire the eloquence of those
who’ve still got something to lose
like daylilies that can’t afford a face-lift
or the shell of the baby turtle on its back
like the sun disc of a Mayan calendar
that was destroyed by boyish malice
before it could live long enough
to be old enough to be doomed
by its own self-fulfilling prophecy.
Autumn is a seance of long-forgotten fragrances.
Oceanic elixirs and and sad sad wines
trying to keep their chin up
like wild grape vines against the weather
that sends their bruised amphorae to the bottom
with heavy eyelids and tunnel vision.
The air is sweet and thick and pendulous
as a bell in a burning church
that’s been to one too many funerals.
Bring on the night
like the deepest inspiration of the light
in the nightbird’s breast
and let the lost harvests and unfulfilled longings
that stretch for light years out over the abyss
like the strings of a cosmic guitar
or the harp I made from the wishbone
stuck in my throat like a sacred syllable
that goes witching for water on the moon
in the watersheds of my voice.
Bring tears of blood to my eyes
raised up out of the well of my being
and holding my horned skull up to Jupiter in Aries
let me drink to the hidden beauty of the singing
and all those oceanic veils of seeing
that fall away like the eyelids of roses
the starmaps of asters
from a beautiful woman’s face.
Old enough now to celebrate
things I know I’ll never know again.
Young lovers jay walking across a busy street
hand in hand as if
the other were the other’s missing link.
The wide-eyed stargazers
with no scars or bruises on their telescopes
elevated now by their amazement to sidereal heights
who will later be deepened by it
as the darkness grows more sublime than the light
and radiance sways into ripeness
and the candles go out one by one
to clarify the long autumnal way home
like nightwatchmen just before the break of dawn
having done their rounds
sit down at the crossroads
where the celestial equator
intersects the ecliptic at the equinoctial colure
and opening the gates of their lanterns
let the stars and fireflies out of the mason jars
that were the only light they had to go by
that kept the others lit.
Even as the utilitarian chandeliers
of the streetlamps come on
like a constellation of runway suns
that light up in unison at midnight
to give our long departed gods somewhere to land.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!