En.Citatepedia^®.ro

To Be Alive Here

To be alive here
is to suffer the godspear of light
that enflames your breath with life
through the heart, the night
of its knapped shale
embedded in every part
like a mystic jewel in a wound that never heals
or a hidden nightbird in the far fields
when only the stars are listening.
To be alive here is to know
your only here and now
is to be alive.
Born into the lifeboat,
who needs to be rescued?
Is the fish afraid of drowning,
does a bird implore the sky;
is there not enough room in your eyes for stars?
Images, thought, symbols, feelings, words,
we live behind billboards illuminated
by artificial daffodils of light,
and walk our own midways alone
from tent to tent of sensation,
from mutant perversity to mystic elation,
blind in the blazing: come in, come in,
to the darkness under a flap of your skin.
How much has not changed for how long
inside the cocoon that diapers your reluctance
not to hump out of yourself with wings,
not to jewel the maggot with stars,
not to let the swamp hold up its waterlily,
not in overcoming or advancement,
not a white diploma of moonlit skin,
but a symbol and a celebration of what became of you
elaborating the world generation after generation
until, not enough just to see it,
your eyes immersed in the sea like rain
that has known the roots of the flowers
and opened the golden mouths of the grain
and washed the stars out of the hair of the fool,
and rinsed the age like a bloodstain off the stage,
you can finally be it.
You are empty.
Blood unspools like a thread
drawn out like a river unravelling the oceans of you
that used to lap these flesh bound shores
and flaunt this palace of bone on loan
from an absentee owner.
There is no face under your name
that isn't looking away from itself
like light from the sun.
Utterly subjectivized, the imagination
reverses its spin
and things come undone,
and the skies that have dropped like petals from their eyes
to see without seeing the unseeable
are neither many nor one
nor the ineffable sum of the unbeable
because all things have already been achieved
and the world returned like water to the mindstream
it was taken from
like a snake that startles the stillness
before it flows away into the silence
or the light of a star that shines within
that doesn't trouble the day.
But to live here in irrefutable bliss
you mustn't confess to anyone
you were born knowing this.
To live here truly is to live
as if you had never existed,
though there are lifetimes behind you
like footprints on the road of ghosts
to say where you've been,
and every breathless glimpse is the eye
of someone you've never seen.
Here is the everywhere of is
and there is no shadow of another,
no map of blood to follow you like a pilgrim,
no sister, no father, no mother, no brother
you could possibly mean
to the photo-album of an ageing gene
that doesn't remember you
except as someone who was passing through
who didn't know what things could lead to
when the stranger in the dangerous valley
took the highroad out of the mountains like an echo.
To be alive here
is to suffer one day, and dance the next,
to pass by rooms within yourself you never open
like tiny lockets of rain you weep alone in the shadows,
among so many furious stars,
trying to seed the pain with flowers
or patch new skin, a cool herb of light
over the burnt face of the moon like waterlilies
so the black mirrors will reverse themselves in the night
and turn your eyes away
from the things you can't shatter with looking.
To be alive here
is to know you are dying,
the whole breath of the moment in every death
baling like overwhelmed boats to stop your crying.
Where do we go? Does anyone know?
Are we cinders and crows in the eyes of this shoreless sea
that watches us like a dream
no one can wake up from alive,
is this disproportionate night the jewel in the hive
that eclipses this rapture of honey
with more space than the flowers and stars can face?
Is a dead thing the king of its own skull-throne
or a toy of the ants lugging dismembered butterflies through its eyes
like sails crushed in the ice of a northwest passage
to be reassembled like moonboats on the other side?
We are islands and waves
and we close our eyes like the sea
in the imageless depths of our own inconceivability.
We are humans, worlds within worlds, and each
with a light of their own to know them by.
We are stars circling the lighthouse of our own knowing
like words off the coast of consciousness
that all mean, like birds, the same boundless sea
that slowly wound its aeons up like alarm clocks
to set us off like an insurgency of thought.
We are humans, bells and hells of blood and water that walk
upright like lightning rods wired to a brain
that the sea panned like a nugget of light
freaked with night, from the ore of a lunar vein
and everywhere we fall upon our own roots
and wash our own skulls clean of ourselves
like rain that was once alive
to raise them again like the moon to our lips, and thrive.
Long-winded brevity; brief longevity,
to be alive here is to be constantly giving
without knowing what your true gifts are,
like rain and rocks or the light of a star,
because even to share
is to set us apart divisively,
to break the plough like a wishbone.
There's silver in the voice of the rock when it speaks of change
and though the rain doesn't really know what it seeks to be
it gives itself everywhere inexhaustibly like a hinge
to the turning of everything,
and how could the night have guessed
the enlightened fury of a star
under the scars of its own elements
would lead to us in all our radiant intelligence
like something it got off its chest?
To be alive here is to know
that a single dropp of water is enough
for the moon to swim in her own seas again,
and there are tides in the windowpane she transits
flashing with life, tiny glass fish
that make a turmoil of devotion
by seeding the ocean with eyes.
To be alive here is to know the wise
know less than you on both sides of the mirror
that lies in pieces at their feet like waves
that have learned to hold their tongues.
To be alive here
is to read a book on transcendence
while you're sitting in the sun,
to ask why the moon is crying
when you've already drowned in her tears.
Is it holy? Is it joy? Is it real?
And look at the way it takes the whole of itself
from beginning without end to end without beginning
to make a single eye, all the measureless aeons of the myriads
that stand behind and before the seeing
timing the shutter-release
like someone taking their own picture,
running to get in the shot
before the flash goes off like light in the abyss
to illuminate the billions upon billions of faces
shed like apple-bloom in the orchard
from the radiant tree of its rootless being.
What is this without antecedent
I so urgently need to know
that I have poured the stars into me
and the starlessness of long, autumnal nights
and slept like the eyes of the rain in the roses of hell,
and grown black pearls out of a grain of dirt
like new moons in the mouth of a funeral bell
and hurt and hurt and hurt until
I could not tell who or what
was suffering me in and out of existence
like a dream in a fire that burnt without consuming,
my eyes in space twisted like melting windowpanes,
and darkness running down the blade of my solitude
like a night dew of black blood on the tongue of the moon
as I shook in my chains like an avalanche
imprisoned in the heart of a mountain
where I wept like a metal in the cold abyss
of a horror without eyes or a name
that is everywhere this
that keeps killing me into bliss
by striking me like fire from a rock,
like the rainbow from its lock,
like a sword from the stone of the moon.
The universe pours itself out like a fountain
into its own inexhaustible mouth
like a drunk with a jewel in a bottle in a brown paper bag
up against the writing on the wall
in a dangerously infinite back alley
where Peter pretends to love Sally.
In each and every part it gives and takes
the whole of itself like a gift, like an ocean,
like an ocean breaking into eyes,
or the squirrel in the bluebells,
or me sitting here with the trees, waiting for leaves.
And everything is so eloquently
this effusion of transformation
as if fire were a music all its own
and in every flame and face,
thread, star, thorn, leaf, flower and voice,
in every feather and wave of awareness,
in every thought, feeling, and delusion,
and in what is beyond what we think,
the whole of the tapestry, the whole of the sky, the sea, the vision,
the mystic specificity of the indefinable,
the creative urgency of the uncreate
dropping worlds like pebbles in a pond
where every ripple opens its horizons like an eye
and even the rings of the tree are a slow pulse,
and the waterbirds shed their jewels in moonlight
and beyond beyond into the immaculate darkness of the thriving night
is the way their wings beat, the heart flows,
a star reaches out to touch the skin of a grape,
or a wave greets an island in a new language,
or a god drowns in himself so again and again and again
he can review his whole life flashing before his eyes
through every one of us,
through the rose and the bloodstain,
through the doorway and the window and the dream,
through everything that seems and unseems itself
like roads of light that move like snakes in the water,
like the holy paths of the unnamed ones
who return like memories of coal converted to diamonds
dancing with fools in the translucent bliss of their clarity.
One existence. Many. None. Three waves of light.
The sea. The sun. I am manifested
by everything I've ever been
like the running of a river
without beginning or end,
not old water behind, and new ahead,
but the whole universe, my watershed,
I am drawn from the well in this bucket of a body
enflamed by this fierce urgency of stars,
inextinguishable fire on the water,
growing eyes like ambassadors
from everything I am
to the empty throne
of the infinite bloodline
that delivers me like a message to me,
worlds within worlds like the sea in a bottle
bobbing at my feet.
And everything is always teaching;
every tree runs a school, every star
is a private tutor, every flower
a sage in a brothel, this harlot of blood
the wine of an unknown church,
and every bone in my body
the rung of a descending saint.
And what do they inexhaustibly teach
if not the youness of you to you,
if not the dark abundance
of your formlessness through forms
as if the world, and all that are in it
were your native language
and you were the ancient future of everything,
and every seed, a betrothal; and every flower, a bride?
Why suffer like a refugee at the gate
of your own estate
by refusing to let yourself in
through the open doors of the trees;
With eyes that are wider than space
where can you hide from your own being,
or wash the seeing from your face?
Does ubiquity look for a place to stand,
a place to call its own, a seat at the table,
when everywhere it's the homeless host
of these world-bearing guests who bow like trees
on the branching thresholds of a boundless feast?
In the furthest fields of yourself
you are the star, and the flower, and the seeing,
and it's the namelessness of everything
that grows a mouth without saying like a word
that gathered overnight on the tongue of a leaf
that can taste you like the nascent stars of an old belief;
you have shone so long alone in the dark
to be alive here in every inseparable part.

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 Drag On My Cigarette

I drag on my cigarette
and pull the coffee up to my mouth
as if I were officiating at a sacrament
and it were some holy bell
extolling the black wine of the bean.

I am always more in the morning
than I will be again all day
and the light is creative until precisely noon
and I am at peace in the impersonal intimacy
of flowing along like a star or a man or a leaf
in this great dynamic that never goes anywhere outside itself
like a bloodstream, a mindstream, the nightstream
that flashes in the woods like the eyes of a beautiful woman,
and yet all these worlds within worlds move with it
as fluently as thought and feeling
in a mind that is not divided by decisions
or trying to locate itself like a constellation
on a starmap in the rain,
insanely fitting every dropp
with the axis of a pin
to divine the source of the shining.

And it's always been a mystery to me
how I can be so ignorant and all-seeing simultaneously
but what keeps me alive, breathing, beating, baffled and alert,
a gust of awareness, of wheeling air and images
in a moment of joy and dispersal
where the light touches the dirt like a lover
and the dirt rises,
is this infinite instance
of an inconceivable intelligence so intimately close
the flame leaps from the fire,
and the moon falls from its flower
like the petal of an hour that overslept
and the birds are swimming in the shadow-waters of the trees
like elegant, inexhaustible pens in ink
that leave no trace on the sky of anything
beyond what the mind can think
until it stops turning the days like the pages
of a journal only the wind keeps
like autumn leaves and mindless sages
and learns from the seed-mouth how to sing
of the abundance that flows from its undoing.

Stop trying to prune the rose with its own thorns.
You can't put serpent fire out with water
or grasp a question by the neck
to milk the crescents of the moon for an antidote.
Would you put a bit in the mouth of the wave?
Would you uncoil your cravings like flypaper
to catch a star
then green it through the glass of a canning-jar?
Is the you of what you do
the you of who you are
or deep inside is there a blind jewel
that's waiting for you to turn the light around
and give it eyes
so you can see through yourself
and stop trying to net fish with the moon's reflection?

But if you think the answers will put the matter to rest,
get the world off your chest
like the shadow of the stone twin
that mimicked you into self-consciousness
and stalks you even now unseen
like a dog or the moon or eclipse of the blood
closing the mouths of the lilies that speak for the starmud,
you have not followed the questions
far enough into your life
where you have never been
to understand how little the answers really mean
when the ant moves the mountain
and the grass is green.

I stand in the furnace of the worlds like wax
and know the fury of the fire is everywhere at peace with itself,
and the only holy wars are lonely and creative.
As I am, as I am, as I am,
my singular appeal and pulse,
my homely simulacrum for the event I call me
when I knock like waves on my own door
to ask whose footprints line the shore
and only the moon's face on a threshold of water
rises like the gentile coast of a skull
to say I don't live here anymore.

You can't wash the night off
by taking a bath in an eclipse
and there are darknesses so intensely clear
that colours would only pollute the brutal purity
of the eye that dispossessed them,
poured them out like a delirium of words and wine
that could no longer dumbfound the emptiness
with the enlightened delusion of being forsakenly me.

And to say whatever this is before me now is nothing
is wrong
and to say this darkness myriads into form
and lucidly fills the world with things
is wrong,
and it is not mind or death or dark matter
nor me nor you nor God nor the devil
and yet its utter stillness mountains into mushrooms and fountains
and the whole issue is apparent in every event
like the taste of salt and stars
in the mouth of an open wound.

Is your skull honoured by what it must contain,
is the stone you lay your head upon
appalled by what it props up
when its metals reveal
the swords and crowns
you've poppied with blood,
or is your head still cooling
like mystic bread on a windowsill
like the universe
straight from the ovens of hell
in a purgatorial breeze
your goodness defanged like a whip?

Or maybe you're writing love poems
on the sails of a boney ghost ship
to a lifeboat on the moon
bobbing in a sea of shadows?
Or the leaves at your door
who show up with maps to save you
don't know what autumn is anymore
or how to follow the wind to the far shore
where the straw keeps faith with the grain
and the scarecrow is feathered with fire
and there is no distinction between joy and pain
and the stone dances as fleetly as moonlight
silvers the vein of the garden snail
that smears the slow stream of its going
across my radiant path
like the enlightened thought of a tiny brain?

Have we not already come again and again
to a place we have never existed,
is this not the effusive locus of every moment,
the inceptive finish of every breath we give back
to the sustaining intimacy of the unconceived
who nourish conception with their emptiness
and confide themselves like seeing to the seen
and shape space like water into eyes
deeper than a full eclipse of the moon?

You cannot fathom the strangeness of this moment you are,
you cannot assess the span of your being with wings
or appeal to a god like a bloodstream
you can pour yourself back into like wine
seeking tomorrow's delirium with yesterday's vine,
when the whole of creation is the merest suggestion of you
out to the furthest star
that puts itself out like a torch
in its own reflection of who you are.

You don't have to study your eyes to see
or cultivate your features like a holy book to be.
Because there is no intention in the emptiness
there is no karma to redress
and nothing to bind or separate
and no witness to affirm or deny
and nothing to diminish or enlarge
and no wisdom in the waterlily
nor ignorance in the swamp,
and the clouds let go
and the chains lay hold
and the lead doesn't taste of gold
but the union doesn't differentiate
among its exquisite distinctions
and the old woman is not old
and the cripples run
and the road outpaces the racers
like a long finish line
and there are no fractures when everything is whole
and no god when everything is.

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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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
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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Gray Rain

Gray rain
but the trees
are teaching the stars how to break into leaves.
Good rain on the good earth.
Autumn's a long passage.
Spring is full of thresholds.
Rainbow bridges in the distance
over urgent streams.
Everything's in a rush to become something.
I thought I knew once
who I was supposed to be
but more and more it eludes me
like a future that's already behind me.
I leave it to the world
to finish what I began
and include myself in the mystery
and try to carry on like a man
who looks at a star he won't follow
through the branches of the burgeoning trees
as the history of who I am
now that I'm not anymore.
The less I am the more there is to be.
And one eye doesn't get in the way of the other as much.
There is just this as it is
and what am I beholding
if I'm not looking upon myself as I am
in common with everything
that's changing all around me
like a mind that can't contain itself
in any fixed mode of being
anymore than the eye
can decide what it's seeing.
Everything is burning with life in the rain
and change is the dangerous bliss
we feel when we cease to exist.
The trees might have fingerprints
graven into their bark
and you might accord them
an identity in the dark
and approve of their names
and let them pass as if you knew who they were
but that doesn't make them
any less of a stranger than you are
or the clouds carry passports.
Praise be to the abundance of oblivion
and the cornucopias of blackholes
in the hearts of the galaxies
that keep wounding themselves into life
by falling on their own swords
like a knife that heals.
By day the light gives.
But at night
it steals.
And the mirror lives
and pours water over the eyes of the blind
and suddenly the stars can see again.
And the grape hyacinth is drunk on blue wine.
And I'm walking on water on the moon
even as the moon walks on my tears
without knowing which ones
flowed from the bells of my sorrows
and which overwhelmed me
like birds in the fountains of joy.
First I am a man.
And then I am a boy.
Spring takes itself for granted.
And autumn comes on with regrets.
But they both know
this is as good as it gets
and nothing's missing
in the mind's lost and found.
It's just the way things get around
when you throw the world back in the water
like a life of your own
you gave up years ago
to be who you are now.
Praise be to the stars
that stop by the gate this late
to chat about gardens
and how to keep
the roots of the roses alive
when the ground hardens.
Even if you're a demon in steep descent
or an angel rising from hell
life has the power of a flower
and the genius of a universe
to turn falling into a calling
like planets and Canada geese.
You can walk out alone
into a wide open field at night like I do
and stand there under the stars
that have been staring at you since childhood
like someone they should keep an eye on
and say: This is me. This is who I am as I am
to the whole twinkling lot of them in self-defence
to uphold the savage dignity of the difference.
You can stand there in the vastness
of that one definitive thought
that goes on forever like a silence older than birds
and feel the sweet release of upending joy
trying to master its new freedom
when space morphs into a mouth for a moment
and says softly
o so softly
in a voice that's been singed by compassion:
No.
You're not.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Lonely Island Music

My lonely island music,
already I see in your eyes, devastation in the dead zone,
skulls littering the field, autumns wandering away
weeping like windows that mistook themselves for the sky
and murdered a bird. Mystic September, vamp of this vision,
how could the moon not leap from my tongue
in praise of the world that shines through you
bathing alone in the dawn of every moment, utterly
alive, your beauty the page of a unwritten scripture
poised in the ink at the nib of every blade of grass to say
beyond the saying
what can’t be said. How unbearably sad
in this defeated hour that so few know the truth
that walks ahead of them like their own footprints
returning to the door they left by, already lost,
their houses, foundation stones of quicksand. Get it right in the seed,
get it right in the root of the eye, let the wind
take the ashes, sweep the shadows from the stairs,
and all the moons of yesterday are caravans of blossoms on the water.
Get it wrong and you’re a widow plundering corpses
for wedding rings and pocket-watches, black rain
on the open eyes of the dead. Devoid of transcendence
in the mirroring awareness, on a diet of fire,
you’ll end up combing your hair with a ladder.
Can you hear this bell of green before it rings, can you see
the painting in your blood before the brush is lifted
like a maggot of consciousness to the rose?
If you can, then check your shadow at the threshold
and walk naked into the far fields of your seeing, your feet
on the ground, your head in the stars; if you can’t,
you’re deepening your ignorance by ignoring your depths,
your light passes over itself like an eclipse or the hand
of a black magician, conjuring. Peril in the seeing.
A mask of frost over the surgical face of the heart. Understand
deeply and with authority that this dream cannot be understood,
taste this dream for yourself and look once
into the brilliant darkness that lies beyond wisdom and forsaking
and acknowledge in a crown of water
you are queen of that, your own teacherless realms.
Can’t you feel the roots of the black orchid of this space
wounding the soil with the stars of another night-sky
already opening above and below you? Rightly and brightly,
you are that opening, the sum of all the awareness of the whole of your life
expressed in the unborn no-point of a star of perception in space,
blue knowledge beyond the scope of the death-sighted.
Why study your own legends like snapped twigs on the trail
and send yourself in a straitjacket to school
when you already know by heart
the book of the breath you must live? Open your fist. Where
did it go? What’s in your hand? Do you understand? Our lives
are the shadows of birds sown like seed across the skies,
fish-maps printed on water, compasses looking for directions
that don’t exist. We are brief and we are vital, pilgrims
on a bridge of ancient zeroes, angels under every stone,
gypsies at home. Hold your life up like a match to a mirror in a dark room
to see whose face it is
then blow yourself out like an orchard
before blazing becomes a kind of blindness.
Put the world to your lips like a finger
in the black clarity of the silence. Do you see, do you see
the white songbird of the moon enter the throat of the well
to flaunt its plumage privately in an empty theater,
the roar of the ghosts of the infinite aeons for applause,
the sound of one hand clapping? Anciently, you were so
and now you are so
and tomorrow after tomorrow you shall be so, hidden
right under your own nose, calling yourself like a girl to her friend
when the game is over to come out of hiding. Most people
never understand more than a keyhole and a whisper of themselves,
trembling behind the dangerous doors of their own names
when they’re called to come out and play
with a universe that begins in every moment,
a fire-fly in a canning jar. They graze on the fodder of illusions,
domesticated by their own cupboards and cowardice,
peopling the wilderness beyond their artificial paradise
with demons that threaten to behead them in a palace coup
for the genuine liberation of an empty throne.
The blossom doesn’t know its own beginning,
nor the snowflake, its end. Can you find your true face
in this mirror of echoes,
the one you wore before the birth of silence?
I shall come looking for you like the wind
and I shall find you among trees and flowers
and among the grasses of the fields
and in the living light that breathes over the harvest
and in the water-mind of the stream that flexes the reeds
and playfully graces the ripe honey of the sun
with a sweetness unknown to the business of bees. No inside, no outside,
everywhere I step is the arrival and the walking of my blood
the whole of the way to you from whom I cannot be separated,
slipped like a letter under a door that opens, a mouth in space,
to paint the moon on an eye of scarlet water. One leaf falling,
the whole history of the world
in the way I love you by letting go; in the way
when you are closest, your heart, the thunder
of subtle intimacies in a lost well,
I drown in the vastness like a bird in the reflection of the sky,
happy refugees all along the side-roads of my nerves,
my mind, a fool of the moon, all parade and passage.
Do you understand? Not different, not the same,
we are rain on a window, faces beyond
the blindness of mirrors that use our eyes to see.
In every feather, in every leaf, in every flight of the word
ten thousand dawns, all of the earth,
this emptiness within emptiness singing to itself in the void.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sometimes Think

Sometimes think I'm always
a life too late
to catch up to my own
walking away weary of waiting for me.
Or I'm a star too far ahead of my own shining
and that's why it's always dark.
I know the agony
in the stones of an abandoned bridge
that shoulders the world for nothing,
upholds nothing but its own mass
and waits for things to pass.
And even when I fall into the river
to flow along with my own mindstream
without consulting the leaves like maps
I still can't get the moon off my back.
Look at all these orchards
littered along my banks
from the tent of a single blossom.
And there are nights
when I can smell snake on the wind
as if everything were about to happen again
and I still haven't milked the fangs of the moon
for an antidote to the pain
or put out the third eye
of the irrational surveillance camera
that oversees the sorrows of the insane
when it's full.
I like my perfections whole enough
to include what is not
and if I am immoderately empty
it's so I can make space for the world
like the blood-sea of the rose
that flows out of nothing
into tides that shed their waves
like the eyelids, brides and petals
of a human heart.
My breath is silver.
My breath is gold
I've mined from the mystic mountain
that got in my way
whenever I tried to cross
the valley threshold.
I had to evaporate to rise to the top;
I had to get myself together like a cloud
to transform my own delusions
into a glimpse of the other side
that didn't take a scapegoat for a guide.
Now space is my only familiar
and the being behind the face
of who I was a moment ago
is just another snake in the furnace
of this star that sheds my skin like fire.
Streams of insight
that are not predicated like mirages
on deserts of thought
trying to spin themselves
into mirrors and silks of glass
like a new religion
sweeping the world like sand
advance the gardens
of the water-givers underground
who teach the flowers how to bloom
and drown like stars
in the infinite opening of their eyes.
And I've mauled the nets of the constellations
like a man in the morning
walking through a high field
radiant with spiderwebs
and if there's anything
left hanging in the wardrobe
that used to house my masks and cloaks
they're veils I've torn from the light
to better see into my darkness.
I'm still looking
but nothing has appeared yet
and no sleight of mind
that's ever mastered me
has ever taught me how
to realize the inconceivable
except in the proportions of a human
whose mere existence is utterly unbelievable
whenever I turn the light around
and discover the dispersing stars
I have followed so long and far
into the unborn darkness where I begin
shining within.

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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I'm Flying Under The Light

I'm flying under the light to avoid detection.
There. That's the first line. A cornerstone.
Maybe water, granite or quicksand
but the cosmic glain
is cracked open like a skull
to extract the message from the fortune-cookie.
The second line comes easier
though it hasn't come yet.
I'm waiting like a crematorium at the end of my cigarette.
Yes. Hot coffins for cool people.
Like it. Where's the rest?
A mirror looks into my face
and sees the enlightened folly of creation
is not the work of a clown.
Forgive the little arrogant flag of flame
I've been trying to raise
out of a nation of ashes
like an arsonist with noble aspirations.
I've looked up at too many stars over the years
not to see beyond my next breath
like a cloud of unknowing,
a road of ghosts,
into the sweeping clarity
of the silence and the darkness
that have unmarrowed me like a bone
to grow new organs of light, new senses,
new eyes and hearts and minds
that are free of the ferocities of night
that consume them death by death
in unextinguishable fire.
It's a mode of compassion
I can't get off my chest,
my way of venting with tears in my eyes
when I consider what becomes of us
who stood here once in the high starfields
alone in an opening between the groves
and gave our eyes back to the sky like water
that tasted of too much suffering
to be sweetened like an apple by grief
or provide us with a vision of relief
that floats better
than all these lifeboats of belief
we've overturned.
Time's refugees,
even in the donated tents of these bones,
flapping like skin in a desert wind,
only our homelessness is our own.
Like stars and dirt and leaves
we're swept off the stairs
across thresholds, out the door
and into the dustpans of our own eyes
whenever we think about putting down roots
and waking up beside our own boots
like bodies that walked all the way with us
to a known address and a bed
we didn't share with the dead.
Even when the moon is full and beautiful
I can hear the clacking castanets
of the crabs and the pebbles
rounded like skulls in the tides
of the untold myriads
that have come and gone like the sea.
To be so much and then nothing,
to be washed clean of everything you cherish
to watch the dyes run like blood and paint
or arsonists from autumn leaves
when your mind has lucked out
like a watercolour in the rain
and your brain unspools like mud.
Sometimes I think my awareness
is no more than the smear
of an incidental rainbow
on a distended bubble
whose inflation always
snaps back on itself in tears.
I prick myself on the thorn of a star
and let my eyes pop into vaster skies
and almost convince myself
that our bodies are crushed like grapes
to deepen the abyss of the wines
that bleed us into oblivion.
Or life is a dream without a dreamer,
fireflies in a well without an echo,
a magician so overcome by his own spell
there are doves flying out of his nostrils
and fish building nests in his brain like a tree
and yet he still can't conceive
of what he pulled out of his hat.
And fulfilment may well be the enlightened flower
of the ignorant roots of desire
like the truth in the mouth of a liar
but I'm not assuming I'm a vegetable
and who knows,
when you put it all together
from the earth and the light and the rain
into one brain
I might be nothing more
than just another kind of weather
trying to take shelter
in this makeshift eye of the storm.
But do you see what I mean?
There's no more continuity in being blind
than there is in looking into the face of God
and seeing the worlds within worlds
that seep like feelings into her thoughts
as if one world without a witness weren't enough.
Words stumble here like physics
before its singularity
and are left like bodies and shoes
on the myriad thresholds of hyperspace
where the worlds pour into each other
like a waterclock of salmon
returning to the source of it all
like the pulse of the sea to the call
of the voiceless bell that gives birth
to all the unimaginable generations of time
that have wounded the faceless mirrors of eternity
by breaking the silence and serenity
of the well that would not answer
by dropping in like eyes
that disappear in waves
washing out their own reflections.
Sometimes it seems as if
there are only two kinds of people in the world:
those that are going and those that have gone.
Where did they go?
Where are they coming from?
Are we the only strangers on the road
and our inhospitable purpose, this passing?
When she leaned on the windowsill
and cradled her head in her hands
to watch the summer clouds
her arms were cormorants of light
and she wore the window awry like a crown.
And the old Japanese man
with hair whiter than moonlight
who used to apologize to the weeds
he uprooted all morning long
in the whisper of a language
only he could understand
for making a distinction.
Where have they gone
where eyes can go and see and come back
across the threshold of their extinction,
mile zero of a road that leads
everywhere all at once
like any point in the infinite space
of the expanding universe?
Why must we leave
the mystic particulars of our lives
like shoes and bodies and names
at the opening door of our bootless generalities?
These fingertips were kissed by a mother
who strung them tenderly
like ten little birds
ten little arrows
to the lips of her bow.
Now that they've flown
can anyone follow
the light into the unknown
or lift their reflections from the waters,
their shadows from the gound
like breadcrumbs and fingertips
to say where they've gone
or even more impossibly
find out where we are now
so they can find their way back to us?
Or is all that we ever were and will be
irrevocably lost
like the root in the flower
that passes it by
on its way into the open
where its eyelids fall away?
When I fall away from myself
like a dropp of water
from the tongue of a leaf,
an unspoken word, a tear,
like rain on an autumn headstone
will the stone ripple
like the rings of a tree
to let you know
that the great sea of life
still jumps like a fish within me
to break through the immaculate
silence of the pond,
its undulant membrane of light,
like spring in the morning,
like a pulse of light beyond
the dark side of the mirror
that has never seen the moon,
that absorbs everything
like a cloak, or an oilslick,
an eclipse, a black hole
where things never appear,
to let you know I'm here. I'm here
where I have always been
where the joy of life transcends
its own thresholds of meaning
by parting its own waters
like the wake of a night passage
or the curtains of an open window
or a woman who opens her legs like a compass,
suffering her own felicity
to give birth to the shoreless sea,
dropp by drop,
you and me
each moment we live
where death hasn't laid down its threshold
and birth can't get through its own gate
because the concepts have left no living ancestry
in this empty world of now
where we live, where we
have always lived,
our elbows on the horizon
like two moons on a windowsill,
wondering, longing, dreaming,
a breath, a veil, a mist
as we evaporate
like visions off the lakes of our eyes
into the great abyss of our unknowing
like a nightstream that lives
blindly belonging
to what's going on, inexhaustibly.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Not Quite Dawn

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Every Word Turns Away

Every word turns away
shame-faced and a liar
when you try to say things so true
they could only be contaminated
by a mouth.
And the tree in your voice
may be its own guitar
and every flower of your breath
be rooted in stars like the wind,
and you can spend a whole lifetime
trying to say everything
as if words could exact living destinies
from the names on the scrolls of the dead
to save everyone, to save
everything that exists
from nothing,
but when you're done,
when the tree falls silent
and the bird has flown away,
everything, just as it is,
will still be left unsaid
and just as there is no likeness for the living
there will be no likeness for the dead.
It is the unsayability of the mystic theme
that runs through us like a road through a dream
or the poem in our bloodstream
that is the cosmological constant
that keeps on expressing us
like waves of its own water
though we go looking for ourselves
like empty cups
to fill the topics of our names
forgetting like the moon
that water is its own chalice.
Why kneel by the water like the moon
to drink from your own face
as if it tasted any different downstream
than it did when you were a cloud
high on the mountain
when you can taste
the facelessness of the sea in everything
if you drink deep enough?
And there are eyes full of wine
waiting to get drunk on you
that haven't bloomed yet
and wells that your tears
are still falling through
like plumb-bobs and pennies
that haven't reached bottom yet,
and deaths that are antiquely your own
you must rise from
like the hosts of the morning glory
to show the gaping bells of your irrefutable ghosts
it can be done.
Words have bad memories.
Words are troubled sleep and nightmares.
Words are dead trees in a winter swamp
that couldn't wake a mosquito up.
Words are the ring of the gold on the counter top
that tells you it isn't true.
Words are a snakepit of spray bombs
that go off like terrorists
on any average day
in the market-heart of the silence.
Words are wanted posters
nailing their own likenesses
to the crucifix of a telephone pole
to divert their detection like water
from the tines
and witching wands of the lightning
that seeks them out like humans alone in the open.
And if you try to say the unsayable
by smearing the view
with a new holy book
what have you said
that isn't just more graffiti
scratched on a face reserved for God,
or the vast scream of the dawn
just before you wake up from the dream
to discover you're gone?
Words are the negative space
we use to delineate
the shapes of ourselves
when we talk ourselves
like water into fish,
like infinite, open-mouthed skies
that have winged their way into words
like autumn rain in the hearts of the waterbirds
that leave no trace behind.
Words are blind. And eyeless.
Words are boulders
in the throat of the impasse
when the mountain tries to speak
of things that last,
or mud in the stream of the valley
when it lowers its gaze like a poem
to whisper of things that pass.
Words turn the spell
on the sorcerer
and dangle him
like a participial puppet
from the strings
of his own grammar,
his own magic,
like stars in farcical cocoons
on the trophy-lines of his webs.
Why rummage through
the wardrobe of a wave
for something to cover your nakedness
when every time you go swimming
you can wear the sea?
Take a page out of the book of the stars
and keep words behind you
like seagulls in the wake of your shining
so by the time anyone can see you
that's not who you are.
Words are living creatures,
words are all eyes and ears
as vivid and vital as yours
looking out from under the autumn leaves
like a flower pressed into a book
that gives it no meaning
that it didn't have in the fields.
Ignorance doesn't eclipse the light
and enlightenment doesn't illuminate.
You may talk forever around it
but what's the meaning of fire
or sit by the mindstream all night
making constellations of the fireflies
that come together like words
and there may be no separation
between the water
and the reflections of the stars
that ride it like long-legged spiders,
or between you and the earth,
not so much difference
as a razorblade of stargrass,
but what's the meaning of water,
what's the meaning of the earth under your feet,
what's the meaning of that blade of chlorophyll?
Words speak for themselves,
not anything else.
Words are living voices
not harps in the throats of the dead.
A word is not a thought,
not an emotion,
not a stand-in for reality
not the verbal version
of the stem cells on your tongue,
or the eloquent fragrance of a brain
recruiting bees to chafe their pollen into honey.
You can spend a whole lifetime saying
and still not know what a word is,
a whole lifetime feeling
and not know what emotion is,
a whole lifetime thinking
and not know what a thought is.
Beyond appearances
that are not wholly
at the discretion of the depths,
nothing is the likeness of anything else
in the unity of their uniqueness,
the oneness of their oneness,
the mystic specificity
of many rivers
unspooling the mountain
to weave this infinite sea of awareness
into the myriad forms and tongues and waves of us
who take on minds and hang
like empty cups and water droplets
as if we were mere slips of the tongue
on the leaves of the morning glory,
from our own hooked fingers,
the black crescents of the lunar triggers
that play Russian roulette with our heads,
and the dreams that fit us like skin
and the lean watercolours of our sweat
on form-fitted sheets
when our separation troubles us
like waves trying to say the unsayable sea
to islands that already flow
like clear diamonds
that have mastered the yoga of tears.
Everything's like that
when things turn from solid to real.
Even these words.
Even in the fireflies
no one ever sees
deep in the well of the word,
even in the human heart,
the star, the rock, the tree,
in the smallest eye of water
that ever looked upon a summer sky,
the unsayable sea
of the whole of this multiverse
that sheds worlds like cool petals
from the sea mouths of the mind,
the life of everything
effortlessly exists
to explore its own weather
like water, to hold
its own life like a jewel
up to the light
and see everyone crowned
in a palace of water
whenever you say your name
to the stars
just to let them know
that you were here once
as if you meant it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Things I Must Say To You The Crystal Said

Things I must say to you the crystal said.
Jewels I must turn in the light.
Things I have gathered
like wild herbs from the starfields
to make a cool poultice of the moon
to draw the pain out of the wound
like a child that got turned around
when she was born
on the nightside of her blue eyes
to colour outside the lines of her constellation
like one of the original watersheds of Aquarius
that didn't take to the bottle and spoon of lesser wells
that warily sip from themselves
as if they were testing for poison,
but poured herself out
in an elation of so many lifelines
so many rivers vital with beginnings
the world mountain discovered her
like gold in the stone
gold in the mindstream
gold in the ore of its bones
gold that shone even in the darkest of valleys
wherever she flowed
like the white moon
when it wants to be mistaken for a swan
and sheds her eyelids like the petals of a waterlily
that's gone, gone, gone beyond herself
like a waterbird into the undetectable mystery of things
that lifts us up from our own reflections
and calls us to exceed ourselves
by flying beyond our own wings
past the last lake at the end of the universe
we could bask in like a keyhole
in the third eye of an unrelenting sky.

There. That's a breathful.
A dust-devil in a gust of stars.
A precipitous river of my own.
But I like listening to the green mountains
talk about things that are perennially true
that no one ever believes.
There's inspiration in the fires
that inspires their leaves
to burn like old myths
and poems that went up in flames
true to the muse of autumn
that has forgotten their names.

And I'm listening to this little world mountain
this dolmen of a crystal you gave me
this palace of mirrors
that sits above my desk
and tells me things about you
only an older spirit than the road I'm on could know.
It whispers to me at night
like a fragrance of light
from the unseen flowers
behind your eyes
flowing down from the high fields
and unscalable facets
of the mystic mountain you live upon
planting trees.
Abruptly enlightened medieval Rinzai Zen masters
did the same
in the mountains of Japan
as if they were rooting their pupils
like worlds within worlds
within a grain of sand
like the cornerstone of it all.

Trees are the future memories
of a prophetic skull
that stays true to its ancestors
like pines in the fall.
Anyone who plants a tree
raises a temple to the wisdom of birds
who will speak to you
in the native tongue of a new language
in voices older than words.
Anyone who plants a tree
attains what lives beyond them like an afterlife
that's always rooted in now
and even the dead branch
that holds the autumn crow in the rain
when things are bleak with the passage of things
will turn into a strong rafter in the house of life
and the moon will add its blossom to it
and the sun its butterfly
and everything that grows
will greet you as a child of its own.
And life will hold you up
like a candle
like a Douglas fir
like a star
like the tiered pagoda
of a pine-cone
like a mirror
like a bird
like a quiet smile
in the sweetest of solitudes
and well-pleased with what you've sown
hang you like a thousand shining chandeliers of rain
in the sacred groves of the Pleiades
to show you what has grown over the years
from the labours you undertook
from the tears you shed
to green the wounded mountain back to health
by adding your life to its life
is you returning
like a prodigal daughter of water
to the mystic springs
of your own starcrazy source.

Ride the wave.
Ride the snake.
Ride the wind.
Ride the fire.
Ride your own eyebeam
like a sword that delivers
the boon of life
like the first word
of a new universe
that's just heard its name called
like an endless beginning.

You are comet. You are wheat. You are starwheat.
You're a comet in the starwheat
making crop circles.
Aquarius.
Aquarians can take their skin off
and put it on again like water
and pour themselves out forever
like the sea in every dropp
so when the tide returns
it's never empty-handed.
I see a naked watersnake
swimming through the moonlight
like the path of something perpetually true
and inconceivably beautiful
as if time itself had learned to move like that
and every ripple was an era
widening its wingspan in its wake.
Hic sunt dracones.
That's how dragons learned to fly.
The highest and the lowest all in one.
The snake in the claws of the eagle.
Wisdom in the lawlessness of insight.
God.
You.
Me.
The Mysterium.

For those who haven't opened
the eyes in their blood yet
to see the bloodflowers
the bloodstars
talking to each other
like variations of the same light
these visions are the lost dream grammar
of an ancient madness
you can't recover from like a fever.
But to those who know the fireflies
are lamps on the road
the stars are not useless
and everywhere is the clarity and passage
of a river that forever arrives.

And I can see the wounded child
who's brave about her pain
but feels like a ladder in the rain
no one will hold for her
to climb down like the moon from her window.
And those that should have been waiting down below
to catch her if she falls
have scattered like stars
on the insides of her eyelids when she blinks.
Abandonment is that hollow shell
you find washed up somewhere on a beach
and raise to your ear
to hear the sea far off
like a life that's going on without you.
Even the sea can't fill that cup.
Only another emptiness
could feel at home
in the homelessness of that space.
Abandonment is getting up every morning
and putting your face on inside out
and thinking of it as some kind of good luck
you're on the other side of the universe
all on your own.
And though you howl like a wolf on the wind
the moon still cannot hear you.
That's how longing is born
in the fires of separation;
that's how the universe is called
every moment out of the nothingness
like someone to love,
and the deeper and darker the emptiness
the higher and brighter the mountain.
The watershed holds the fountain up
like a bouquet to the rain.
Emptiness doesn't stand like a god
in the shadow of an unknown definition.
It's the selflessness of everything that is.
Unborn it lives without distinction in the heart of things.
Unperishing it dies for everyone
without leaving anyone out.

When insight blossoms
like the moon
on a dead branch
compassion's the fruit
that's always in reach.
Life doesn't practise
what the heartless teach.

This morning
I'm sitting at the feet
of your little crystal buddha
enthroned in full lotus position
as he turns my heart in the light
like a jewel in the eye of a diamond-cutter.
And the sky is generous with tears
as it clarifies the windows of perception
with eyes as old and wise
as the sun at midnight.
And every thought I have of you is a fierce peace.
And every feeling a black mirror
deeper than white
that has extinguished my face
like one of last night's stars
in the bliss of a greater illumination.
The mystic specificity of my mind
pales like the moon
in a blinding abyss
of no-minded indistinction.
And the stars that shone down on nothing for so long
like an indecipherable language
are now looking up at you
like the fountainmouth
high above the treeline
in the mountains
of an Aquarian understanding
of what they've always meant to say.
There are no echoes in the voices of love.
No avalanche of Rosetta Stones.
No scoffing crows.
No genuflections of the dove.
There are no shadows hiding like daggers
under the cloaks of day
to get even at noon
for things that happened at midnight.
Love is a feather
from a passing bird in flight
life puts into the scales
and the earth turns eastward toward the light
and death takes its finger off the measure
of life's most cherished treasure.

And now the buddha turns into
two lovers sitting upright
face to face
in a lotus embrace
of enlightened connubium
in a coincidence of the contradictories
as if two were not the extinction of one.
And when desire opens its flames like petals
and blooms like a phoenix
there are no strangers in the fire.
And love doesn't burn its feet
by making a firewalk
of the nameless constellation
rising from the dark innocence
of its sweet dreamless sleep
like the thirteenth house of the zodiac
with two people home from everywhere
with myths of their own
like Venus and Mars
turning the lights on and off
like lovers and stars
while the neighbours stare in amazement
through closed windows and locked doors
at the bright vacancy of the rumours
the dark abundance of the night
that knows all we are and do
and will and have done
is true to the overproof joy I take
in this lyric of a jewel in the light.
It turns me like your eyes
turning the key in the dark gate
of a mystic moonrise
where fate elaborates the worlds
like pearls from grains of sand
and time refires its last hour
like a master glass blower
to make more space
for stars in the desert at night
by breathing on the flames
that feather the ashes of the moths
in the urns of our names
with the wings
of a dragon
the wings of a phoenix
the wings of a sphinx in the rain
planting trees on the slopes of a pyramid
to watch the dead mountain grow green again
and know all the secret paths down into its afterlife
like a river running through the wilderness
or this theme of stars on the mindstream
beguiled by the mystic wiles
of a cougar caught in the moonlight
like a jewel in the eye of a dreamcatcher.
Or the seasoned seer in a mirror like me
enraptured by the anarchic fireflies
beading themselves
like the mandalic stars
of a new constellation
only the enlightened can see
enflamed like a prophecy
empowered by love
to rise in the night of your name.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
Vote! | Copy!

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
Vote! | Copy!

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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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
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