What Chains We Rattle
WHAT CHAINS WE RATTLE
What chains we rattle in our own emptiness.
The void gnashes its teeth to dust. Is there love
Anywhere that I'm worthy of?
I want to scream in this straitjacket of anti-matter
but you are not here; your person is absent;
so I scream into this paper ear;
I abandon my own blood, turn red white
in my fear of losing you, witnessing your anger,
the small glaciers that inch through my heart
like ice-ages. Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm old,
maybe I'm burnt out, maybe all these words
I throw at you mean absolutely nothing to you
or to anyone else, or even me, but there you have it.
I'm sloughing my old skin like a star-riddled universe
and I don't know what I'm turning into.
When I want to know who I am I look at your face.
Lately I've felt like some kind of eclipse, some darkness
growing like fungus on the light. A leper in sunshine.
Am I broken glass; the black mirror, shattered? I mistake you
often; looking for you in every shard and splinter of my being
but the shadows are too young to give birth to stars
and you can't seem to give me the reassurance I need
to return the moon to the goblet it fell from.
It's not so much that I doubt you but that
the affirmations that should be anvils under the burning swords
crumble under the hammer-blows of the heart.
There is no fire in the answers; only the hiss
of metal cooling in black water. Now maybe I'm gone forever
and maybe you're some bridge collapsing under its own weight
and we're both acting too indignant to be honest,
but I feel a hole in me the size of darkness
and a silence that dreams like God. Are you still there; am I?
Have I woken up without you?
Burn for me, baby; fire all these love-crossed stars up
and let me see you shining and naked on the nightwatch.
I'm tired of issuing all these secret passwords
to an army of spies scrambling clarity in a coding machine.
Perhaps I'm not clear myself or haven't done or said it right,
or there are lies standing-by like unfueled flights to nowhere,
but I feel like my heart's been through a paper-shredder
and there are foreign troops entering the office with orders
to exterminate anyone not already in pieces
or out dancing around the fire at a book-burning. I know you're young;
I know your eyes would have to turn into skies
and your heart, the Hubble telescope,
for you to see me as I am to myself, an infinitely remote galaxy,
the faint smudge of a billion stars and planets
evaporating like breath on a cold windowpane into the void.
A match blown out. Forgive me. I am the light, unmoored, an empty boat
drifting through my own wreckage,
looking for survivors among a feeding frenzy of fins,
all my useless modifiers dangling in shark-infested waters.
I can't even remember what I died in the name of
if anything at all
or who among all these bodies I've hauled into my heart
brought me back to life
if it wasn't you.
But how ridiculous. Two hours to make love;
five and a half until you call
or don't call after our exchange with healing or hurt.
Why am I always the one who is waiting?
You always the one who seems to be labouring
under some onerous imposition?
You're little boxes of wind, back-alley gusts of being,
lifting me up a moment like a leaf
and then off to something else with a gust of indifference.
No sooner do I crawl out from under
these heavy Himalayas of heart-mud
that avalanche down upon me
with every telling remark you don't make, the opening for tenderness
missed again and again by your smouldering silence
then I find myself washed clean of myself
in one of your dry wells of emotion. Do you truly love me
or have I become some fading mirage in this black Sahara
that bares its teeth like pyramids?
And yes, and yes, and yes; I know I am not perfect. I do not think I'm god
unless you and him and her and the daylilies are too.
And if it's a revolution, a coup d'etat you seek
in the secret cells of your mind; remember, it's your own palace
you're overthrowing, your own window you smash.
There is nothing in me or my life
that is not already yours by an immaculate contract of stars.
I feel like a bottle of aged whiskey must feel
when it's been drained to the last drop
and the drinker isn't even tipsy. Have I failed with you
in some essential way that keeps the drunken dancers out of the garden,
the mystic lovers like wildflowers
who have eluded the conforming vases enduring on the mantlepiece?
I love you so much every bit of your seeming unhappiness,
your frustrated, frustrating petulance
is a wound I stitch up with my spinal cord, the ashes of an eye
that falls into the dense atmosphere of my planetary heart like a meteor.
When I'm angry, be certain; it's only a wave
in a measureless sea of devotion, weather squalling the surface of the mirror,
but in the depths, my love of you is law,
however the wind blows open the pages of the book of the moon,
however my name is erased from the water it's written on
even by your hand warping my reflection on the midnight lakes
of your tempestuous seeing.
I shape my body for you. I cajole my hair.
I scrape worlds from under my fingernails
and liberate the life that has lain dormant therein for aeons
in your honour, dedicating each first dawn of creation to your smile.
The golden marrow of my genius is worthless to me
except that it nourishes you in a market of one.
And I am happy to be the nothing that is added to you
so that it amplifies you over and over again by ten. Zero
was ever in love with one since before the beginning of time.
As I love you in this endless succession of an unmoving infinitely finite now.
I want to be your white voice, your green heart,
your black blood, the sky that catches you like a bird when you fall.
Do you see me? I'm standing here rooted to the earth
like a tree that's been gutted by your slow lightning
and yet still puts out leaves like eloquent tongues,
each one whispering you into the song of the other. My heart
is unquenchably yours like a star that turns its light inward
so that it can't be detected by anyone else.
Maybe we're doomed by circumstance and disposition, age
and essence, and maybe we're not, but even in the denying of love
you are the hidden harmony that affirms it.
PATRICK WHITE
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes
So Lifetime After Lifetime
So lifetime after lifetime, sorceress of shadows and dreams
you step out of the dark wood of yourself,
a shy doe, a mournful lighthouse and a warning off the coast
of your infinite solitude, you, the singing bird
on the green bough of your flute pouring yourself
like sorrow over the eye of the sea, your tears,
the ancient wells of an eternal longing unanswered by the secret stars
that have entrusted their radiance to you, fireflies
drowning their light in your black candles,
the blind music of your lonely flowing. Is your flute, a bone, then,
and this rose I bring you, this heart, this blood
that has turned into a goblet of luminous wine,
drunk on the wonder and the missing in your phantom music,
is this rose nothing but a wound, a coffin-flower,
the unmarked grave of a mystic embryo?
Do you fear the tenderness, the meeting? Does the moon
strike at her own reflection in the mirror of her midnight waters
to wander like an orphan along her lifeless shores?
Boy and man, you murder me on the steps of your serpent shrine,
your eyes, cold glass, eclipses of crystal, your spirit
that once drew in the light like breath,
now a slow glacier, an age of ice
pushing your heart before it like a boulder,
like a temple-stone that one night flew out of the abyss
and buried itself like a meteor, a charred jewel, the demon seed
of a religion without saviours, your implacable creed
scriptures of blood in a mouthless book
that only love can open. Once there were swallows in the tree of life,
asylums of celebrants greeting the morning in their madness,
in the garden, in Eden, hurled through that first dawn
like a young girl's heart trembling like a dropp of light on a blade of grass.
Now your voice is a gypsy-crow on a dead branch,
your music, confession without atonement, your flute
without leaves, without orchards, an eyeless spring,
buried in its manger-cloth for years, nothing
but a crib-death, a broken wand, a phoenix
that has lost its faith in fire under the weight of its own ashes.
Beloved, again and again you kill me
in this dance of slayer and slain, tear out
this page of love like a like a child's tongue, like a mute heresy
you are doomed to rewrite forever
in the indelible inks of your seeing.
Do you dip your pen like a water-bird drinking
from its own image, putting out your eyes
to deepen the darkness, the scars of your sin
the lightless letters of a hidden language
pricked out on your skin, black stars and braille tattoos?
The pages and the years may turn like wings and hinges,
and a thousand deaths, all your own,
tome the field with gravestones,
breathless flutes and hollow bones, ancient futures;
and you the only mistress of those solitary realms; still,
your legend will remain moonless and sunless,
the story of a night sky, the eyelid of a black rose,
that couldn't break into light. Until
love stands beside the heartwell of another
as if it were its own sacred fountain,
one blood, one wind-mingled music
playing the waves like plectra, and raises the rim
of the single goblet to its lips and tastes,
only silence answers the terrible vastness,
only death graces the obscenity of these loveless wastes.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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White Skin Black Heart
Yeah, whatcha gonna do now, now that you started?
Whatcha gonna do now, now that its done?
The words got out there, they float around and are coming right back down.
You gonna leave us lying here
Dealing with the consequences of a bad sound
Of a bad sound.
White skin black heart
White skin black heart
Whatcha gonna do now, that its spoken?
These words of a habit, have not faded away.
.................... it clear, conscious gets opened like a wound.
If you cant concieve a better line and better times,
Then let silence bury you, in the end.
When you feel it, when you feel it
Youre condemned.
You see, youve lost your strangle on the freedom road! you
Think ........................of something a long time ago! you
[spewed it out you were so] insecure! it was like ............. on
The toilet floor! youre a [nine seat] drunk, ............... and
You say you want something, .......... you heard the rednecks
Roaring for blood and then they wanted more! life was so small, you
Couldnt get enough. you made a start.
White skin black heart
Dripping,
White skin black heart
White skin black heart
White skin black heart
White skin black heart
Drag your eyes from [aurora] black heart!
White skin black heart
Drag your leg, get outta here [my sight]!
White skin black heart
White skin black heart
White skin black heart
White skin black heart
You didnt have to start
White skin black heart
White skin black heart
song performed by by Midnight Oil
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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First The Tenderness
First the tenderness; I feel the tenderness,
the downy edge of the leaf, the eyelash,
the green tooth of the leaf
gently opening its mouth to the air,
its flag of being high in the branches
unfurling like a sky of its own,
startled by the taste of the first star.
Every dropp of rain that falls
is a jester's cap,
three bells and a splash and that's me
learning how to swim in this new space
with an ark and a flood, you
the dove with the leaf in its beak, returning.
Then I check a little calendar of razor-blades
to see if any of the days
are holy days circled in my blood,
if I'm late for a sacrifice somewhere,
if there's a landmine waiting
like a spiny sea urchin buried in the sand,
glass petals shed from a broken rose,
waiting for me to take my boots off
and walk barefoot dazzled along your shore.
You are honey and wheat, and, angry,
a small storm that bleachs lightning white.
Brave despite myself,
your beauty crowns me King of Fools,
and though I meant to disguise my helplessness
by standing my ground like a iron thorn,
I can already feel the earth turning to quicksand
beneath my feet,
and tremors of an approaching earthquake
that might heave me up out of the sea
like a new mountain.
And it's too early to tell
if it's demons or angels
that prod my heart
with their taunting spears of fire,
or if they're just bored,
hanging out on call,
like a gang of crows
pecking at the seed
I left hope against hope on the moon,
but to judge from the way I feel
like a new element
discovered first on the sun,
all my cells and molecules assuming
a new paradigm, a new mandala,
a new configuration of shining,
an unknown constellation in the doorway,
through either end of the telescope,
they seem to mean business.
Fear rolls out its black carpet
and blood rolls out its red,
but only love walks freely in the starfields,
making its own path in the going
and when I think of you,
I pale like a planet
in the labyrinths of a shadowless dawn,
I am the toy of tides of light,
a rootless island
broken like bread
from the continent I thought I was.
Unless broken from the whole loaf
nothing can be shared, and nothing
can feed the heart
that has not been broken
among the hands of the hungry.
I have seen you as a harvest day in September,
your pulse a windfall of poppies and apples,
your radiance, flying fish
and water goblets shattered translucently on the wave,
a white mare in the mirror trampling a glass serpent,
you were the pure blue of a troubled morning
melting the first frost
on the wild, New England asters
that bloomed among the grounded planets
of an abandoned apple tree
somewhere in New Hampshire;
I thought you were a window of honey
saturated in its own light,
that only the rarest of eyes
that came like bees back to the hive of your heart
could look through.
Now the moon is out. Now
I see the ghost of the water-lily ride the darkness
like the soul of a doomed ship
unloading its cargo in the depths,
or the second blue moon in October
silvering the fields
it threshes with a blessing.
First, the tenderness; I feel the tenderness
overwhelm me in gentle enigmas
of fireflies and small eclipses,
random ignitions of the mystery
that this should be so at all,
and it's as if I could stand beside my heart
astounded by the course of its flowing
as all its rivers run suddenly down to you
like a sea on the moon,
and like the feathers of a stormbird
every sail, every burning paper lifeboat,
every next breath
is a longing off your unmapped coast
and a lighthouse of reason
bawling its warning into the fog
that the star that guides my spirit luminously ignores.
And though my ignorance at this juncture
is a stairwell of wind at a crossroads
and I approach you like a tuning fork
trying to harmonize my ashes
like the urn of a burnt guitar
to sing to you out of the shadows of a summer night,
to touch you with leaves and stars,
to lace the air with the black fragrance
of smouldering roses alluring as the wine of a drunk mystic,
and the beast putting on
his brightest golden chain and collar
to greet your progress through his zoo of desires,
slowly I raise my fingertips to your secret braille of scars
to read the contours of the kells
you have elaborated from your suffering;
the symmetries of passion and solitude,
blood and tears
that ink the mingling of your silent scripture
in the shrine of your deepest intimacy.
First, the tenderness, I feel the tenderness
of a bridge for its stream,
of a fountain on the sun
watching a new comet
rinse the darkness out of its hair with light,
of a tree for its chandelier of ripe cherries
glowing brighter than blood in the night.
And I may be junkmail
on the doorstep to the threshold of your heart,
a wizard shy of magic,
or a kite tangled like a misplaced note
in a stave of humming powerlines,
and I've fallen
on the thorns and swords and obelisks
of my delusions more than once,
lost like a single straw in a stack of needles,
drowned diving
for tiny moons in hard shells on the bottom,
and no one grows fat on the feast
in a crumb of light,
and a rumour of love
is not the burning bush
of prophecy and inspiration in the valley of a woman,
and you are not the blue love letter
of an atmosphere I could take for granted,
but I risk slipping myself under your horizon
like the wingspan
of a homing bird in the dusk,
risk stepping out from the trees into the open
to drink from your reflection
from the waters of a midnight lake
that has eclipsed every other vision
that has intoxicated me indelibly
from the very first sip
to let you know while we live and breathe and love and hope,
though hope is seldom a road that arrives,
the first tenderness; I feel the first tenderness
of being enabled, empowered
by this transfigurative gust of grace
that turns the galaxies deep within me like well-wheels,
to summon the images, wraiths, forms of the world,
as it arrays its jewels
on the flying carpets of life,
to compare with your beauty,
to embody these auroral aspects of you
that play me like a keyboard of light
in the likeness of a woman
whose smile
though it were as many as the leaves of fall,
and eyes
though their shining
outnumber the morning asters,
have never failed to startle me
into realizing everything
I am missing in life and love.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Guardian and BloodRose
BloodRose,
Rose of my love,
My love for Dark moon,
Dark as my heart,
Black as my soul,
And gave me my rose.
The rose of blood,
With petals soft and black,
Never as a rose so beautiful,
Grown not in light,
But under a dark moon lit sky.
Guardian,
Yes a guardian of BloodRose,
With teeth long and sharp,
Claws hard as diamonds,
Scales as dark as night.
My dear sweet guardian,
Guardian black as my heart,
Fire in your eyes,
Shadows in your soul,
A dragon of the dark moon.
A single rose,
With petals so fare,
As dark as my heart,
I now hold in my hand,
The rose of blood.
You are my darkness,
Fear of this love,
This love for you,
Love for darkness,
The cold shadows in my heart
That makes me yearn for you.
Now as you lay dying,
I hold a single rose,
The rose you gave me,
And as I hold it tight,
The thorns slice my hand,
Covered with blood,
My blood.
I have one fear,
The fear of death,
Symbol of my lost love,
Rose as dark as me,
Laying in a pool of blood,
Blood from me.
As I lay dying,
I remember my name,
BloodRose,
I am the rose of blood,
And I died of my own creation.
A creation of perfect beauty,
Petals dark black,
Thorns like small daggers,
Grown from my love,
My love for a dragon,
A dragon as dark as my heart.
Even in my death,
I think of you,
And the rose you gave me,
The rose that killed me,
The Rose of Blood.
poem by Nicolette Gonzalez
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Love Remains (feat. Christopher Cross)
Album: When It All Goes South
When the last drop of rain has fallen
When the final note has drifted away
When the earth ceases to turn
And the last fire has burned
When the wind stops its ceaseless blowing
When the last wave has come into shore
When the sun has called it a day
And the stars have all floated away
My heart will still be yours, baby
My dreams will still be yours, darlin'
You and I will find nothing has changed
Love, love, love
Love, love, love (remains)
When we have grown old together
And the hourglass runs out of sand
Darlin' you will kiss me and then
Forever starts all over again
My heart will still be yours, baby
My dreams will still be yours, darlin'
You and I will find nothing has changed
Love, love, love
Love, love, love (remains)
My soul is one with yours, baby
Just to hold you drives me crazy
In your eyes I see... you feel the same
Love, love, love
Love, love, love remains
Love remains like an endless flame
Through the brightest joys and the darkest pain
In the end....
My heart will still be yours, baby
My dreams will still be yours, darlin'
You and I will find nothing has changed
Love, love, love
Love, love, love (remains)
My soul is one with yours, baby
Just to hold you drives me crazy
In your eyes I see... you feel the same
Love, love, love
Love, love, love remains
Love, love, love
Love, love, still remains
Love, love, love
Love, love, remains
Love, love, love
Love, remains
Love, love, love
Love, love, still remains
Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, still remains
Oh, love, love, love
Love, love, love
Oh, love, love, love
song performed by by Alabama
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Undevoted, Free, And Wild
Undevoted, free, and wild,
no one to answer to, no one to answer for,
the urns shattered, and the ashes scattered,
and the fire liberated to perfect its own combustion
and the stars without anyone to walk home,
and the solitude silent, dark, and deep, cool
as the bliss of a wine-cellar talking in its sleep,
I have grown mad in the heat of the purple sun.
I have spoken from the mouths of the caves in the desert
and not expected the echo of my own voice
to return to me like a pilgrim stashing a gnostic gospel
deep in the sand, without realizing
how much closer to the stars dirt is than I am.
When you're no one but the wind in disguise
you don' need to be humble, you don't need to wise,
nothing to trust, and no one to rely on,
you can watch the dead at night
streaming toward Orion
like a blue-white ribbon of light
undoing the gift wrappings off the bodies and eyes
of people who can see and be again.
And you know it comes to everyone
like a nebular orchid with a fragrance of stars,
that the Sahara will green and bloom again
and the wind sing hymns to the grass
and the gazelles sport their elegant legs,
adolescents in the spring brush,
running like violins succulent with beginnings,
and it doesn't matter you're alone out here
listening to the ashes of a mirage
make up legends to tell the fire
about its ancestors buried on the moon anonymously
and how their blood once stained the earth
like a scarlet letter even the stars couldn't wash off.
The mystic anti-hero of my own dragon myth
I exalt in my isolation like a shriek of revolution
and overthrow myself like a book in the flames
to keep something I don't understand alive in me
as if I had to keep on dying to sustain myself
and the distinction between one and the other were lost upon life.
It's a touch, it's a feel, it's a hole in veil
with one eye looking out at me to see
if I've intensified the dark enough to break into stars,
if I can unravel my heart like smoke like water like fire
and perfectly disappear into the atmosphere of my dispersal
without a shudder of farewell to the masks I wore like scales.
Not to be constrained by even so much as
the single thread of a straitjacket, the husk
of an abandoned sanctuary left to the imagination
of the hermetic flowers to do with as they wish.
I shriek freedom across the heavens like the death cry
of a hawk waking the valley up in the morning.
I whisper to the water things the wind was never meant to hear.
So faithful to my calling, I lead those who come, away from me,
as if it were the perennial custom of the universe
to meet like this for a moment in time and space
and then disperse into the darkness alone like a unlit candle.
I'm a riot of fools in the sublimity of the presence within me
that elates the crazy wisdom of my spontaneous ignitions
and schools the black lightning of its absence
in the folly of trying to enclose my spirit in gates
like a candle in the niche of a tempestuous vision.
Yeeeeeeessssss, I scream into the face of nothing
like the efoliant scripture of my confession and protest
that life doesn't need an alibi to live and die by,
no extraneous, no outer, no other, no object, no subject
no flying buttress to act as a bridge
over a flowing river of Gothic stone,
no strong tree standing on its own to cut down
and carve into a crutch, no cork to keep the ocean out,
no bucket to bail the moonlight out of the lifeboat,
no jade Buddha to make your supplications to,
no footprints on the water Jesus walked,
no cave in Ramadan to receive the angel of light,
no Kabbalah to baffle your way through the night,
no Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescopes
on clock driven equatorial mounts geared to the heavens
to thread the golden needle of the mystery
without any knots in your spinal cord,
to penetrate the vulva of the sea like a sacred shell
that once gathered armies on a burning hillside
to contest their revelations with the tongues of swords.
I shall tell you, my brother, I shall hasten to you my sister
like moonlight through your window, I shall not
hold back from you the least shadow of the furthest star
releasing its dark wisdom like the black doves
of its own excruciating ashes glowing like the pain
of horrendous transformations into light.
I shall not bring you the skins of the dragons I've shed
but inspire you with a fire you've never been burned by before,
a spiritual immolation into a godhead without a metaphor
to guide you by, a torch you can't drown in your tears,
a long firewalk down to a river of stars,
and there you shall cross on a burning life raft
of the bones you've been carrying around for lightyears like a body.
And it's a heresy of silence to say, but there
you shall you shall lie down in the nocturnal emptiness
in the long blue seagrass of the moon
and empower out of your own creative abundance
whatever worlds your longing inspires you to embrace
to amuse the bright vacancy of eternity with time, like love,
and the dark abundance of unperishing potential
with space, like wisdom, and the clear light of the void
and the unspeakable absence of any other voice
to ruin the silence with the bliss and sorrow of seeking
the mystic night you found within you longing like a bird
for the stillness to write it like a lyric of the wind,
a passage of blood through the labyrinth of the heart,
a shadow against the moonrise of a compassionate awareness
there's a divinity that sings like a human
in the heart of everything that breaks its long fast of nothing
with praise and celebration, with fire and light and rain
with the firstt sacred syllables to touch the lips
of the black rose charred in the heart of the dragon, like poetry.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Out Here Alone
Out here alone so late at night
with all these spectacular stars
burning through the clean glass
of the freezing winter air
I can almost hear them thinking
behind the myths of the cover stories
they've told for years
dark truths about life and light
it would be madness in a man to understand.
Don't try to stuff the impersonal secret
of the universe
into your sentimental heart.
How could you ever fit its likeness
into a locket
and finger it lovingly as your own?
Out here alone so late
even if you have come
like a thief in the night
to steal from the light
when nobody's home
there are no cracks no facets no gaps
no backdoors, unlocked windows
or emergency exits,
no stairwells or entrances
in these jewels of insight
that can feel your eyes falling upon them
like rain running down a mirror
that shuts you out
like someone in the bathroom crying
for reasons that are light-years beyond you.
However deep and sincere your tears are
they're still only dry wells
in that vast ocean of awareness,
black snowflakes
on the roaring furnace of the abyss
and if you reach out with affection
hoping to make things better
by embracing it all
you're still only tendering a kiss
to the gaping jaws of your own lipless skull.
There's a silence older than space
in the bottomless heart of things
that makes intelligence seem
the unlikeliest of exaggerations
a human could ever mean
holding his mind up like a lamp to the stars
as if he could find his own way back by his own light
without the dream that themes his mindstream with creation.
But as foolish and futile as it is to surmise
or try to get a leg up on the wise
I don't think the darkness
is the negative space
around the troubled face that appeared
after all the dots were connected
like rising constellations
in a child's colouring book.
And I don't think there are gods
squatting like frogs
on the lotus of the world
making us up as they go along
like wheels and roads
to the grunts and groans
of an axial mating song
anyone could mistake for a joke.
And I don't think the stars
believe the things we say about them
or even remotely feel the mystic dread
of what it is to be a human
looking up at their shining
out of deeper darknesses within
where no direction can be given to the lost like eyes
that would never find their own way home again
were it not for the stars and fireflies that mislead us
from one illumination to the next
by giving the finger to the braille of the text
that would school a gust of stardust into us
like God gave life to Adam
and Eve gave life to God
long before there were any laws to blind them
like Satanic lightning bolts
uprooting their eyes like rain from the clouds
to put those fires out.
I look up at the stars
with the eyes of an exile
through the diaspora of my breath
and I want to think them all to death
like the people and things I've left behind me
when it was time to go my own way
anywhere into the darkness inside me
to see if I could shine a light upon myself
that didn't blind me to the fact
neither in the beginning
nor in the end
was I there to witness the act
that made a certainty as good as a doubt
to the great indifference
that wasn't trying to find me
like a needle of light in the heart of a haystack.
I look up at the stars
like a scarecrow in winter
trying to put its pants on
one leg after another
like a man
with nothing but time to burn
scattering his ashes among the stars
urn after urn
skull after skull
of the heretics and mystics
that were martyred by his scar-crossed heart
in the name of nothing real.
I don't know what they feel
but I look up at the stars
like a black rose
of blood and starmud
in the last death throes
of self-immolation
and see in my own image
what I've always had
in common with creation.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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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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Thunder In My Heart
Writers: leo sayer & tom snow
Standing here alone with you
Wondiring what it is that Im supposed to do
And there you are with the love light in your eye
The bridges are burnt down
Your arms are open wide
Am I in too deep or should I swim to the shore
Is this the real thing?
I dont know but Ive never been here before
And I feel a thunder in my heart that I cant control
I feel a thunder in my heart
Should I walk away or follow my soul?
I feel a thunder in my heart
Where it comes from I just dont know
Oh no, oh no
Theres a storm ragin deep in my soul
Theres a howlin wind that I just cant control
Theresa fire inside me I cant explain
Every time you touch me my love falls like rain
Ive only known you for an hour or more
The time is standin still
Your love has opened up the door
I feel a thunder in my heart
It takes my breath away
I feel a thunder in my heart
Will I ever be the same?
I feel a thunder in my heart
Its telling me youre here to stay
Oh no, oh no
Theres a thunder in my heart
Theres a thunder in my heart
Theres a thunder in my heart
Theres a thunder in my heart
Take me baby Im all yours
Do just what you wanna do with my love
Lets not let the night overtake us
cos whats happening right now may make or break us
Do you feel the way I do?
Open up your heart now baby
Im comin through
I feel a thunder in my heart
Takin my breath away
I feel a thunder in my heart
Since I met you Ill never be the same
I feel a thunder in my heart
I know youre here to stay
I feel a thunder in my heart
Takin my breath away
I feel a thunder in my heart
Since I met you Ill never be the same
I feel a thunder in my heart
I know youre here to stay
song performed by by Leo Sayer
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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What Do We Know?
for Simon and Samantha
What do we know, what does all our knowledge amount to
in these infinite spaces of ours, within and without,
if not less than nothing, perhaps a single hair
in the endless vastness of these abysmal depths
that keep on blooming within us black rose after black rose,
moon-face after sun-face?
And in these realms of transformation
where everything is once, once only for everything,
no second thought, no second person, no witness
or revision, no retrieval once held like water or sand in our hands,
and gone, implacably, purely, time flowing into time;
in this dream without bridges, what
does all our feeling, all the ore we haul up out of our secret heart-mines
and refine in the fires of our desires and longings
over the long labour of a lifetime amount to
if not the flaring of a match in aeonic fathoms of darkness?
Isn’t this life, for all that we say in silence and words, unsayable?
And when we reach for one another, strange auroras
of light and love coursing through our blood
like the mystical horses that graze in the pastures of the moon,
don’t our hands always turn into water
and the radiance that filled the empty bag of our hearts
like August sugars in an apple orchard
leak out of our exaltations,
a refugee line of dead stars pouring out of a defeated country,
sand from a cracked hourglass?
What can we hold here of one another,
even if we become the high priest of the holiness
that shines in the shrines of another’s eyes; even if
we lay our lives down like a patched robe of blood
on the stairs of the temple, small religions to one another
and walk naked and unmasked down the world mountain
back to the crude hovel of a valley heart
that has spent itself completely; what have we achieved
that is anything more than melting snow and mountain streams
washing themselves clean of themselves?
We can whisper like the sea in another’s ear
vows of forever that are written in water by the wind;
or under the closed eyelids of our private skies,
drunk on the dream-wine, replace all our own most intimate stars
with the bright constellations of another’s being
to live in one house of fate together, abdicating our own
like a northern crown. We can do all this and more, so adept
have we become in our grasping and rejecting,
so ingeniously desperate have we grown over the millennia
at weaving moonlight on the black waters of the lake
into the most elaborate tapestries of delusion,
or hiving sunlight out of wildflowers into white gold
to marry a world that keeps slipping out of our immaculate rings
into a blind, mute night so remote it eludes
even its own shadows and echoes. Constantly
offering ourselves like gifts to love, life, destiny, leaves on the wind,
risking annihilation and immaculate ashes,
why do we keep on waking up, returned to ourselves,
address unknown, slumped across own lonely thresholds?
If the world today, if this little wink of eternity
seems so often like a small black match-head
curled into the charred monk of a question-mark
that has swallowed the dancing flame of its own answer;
if people and events seem vicious, greedy, and ignorant,
junkyard dogs posted around heaps of corpses and cars,
the sprawl and scrawl of wreckage and disappointment,
the litter of flies on a winter windowsill
that exhausted themselves against the ice and glass,
looking for an opening; what is it all,
the violence, the drugs, the indifference, the subtle poisons,
the corporate leeches, if not the desecration
of the unattainable, acid-rain hissing on the rose-fire,
the obscenity of human lovelessness?
And yet, even in the midst of such obvious defeat,
crippled by angels and demons alike, we go on longing
to touch and be touched, dry seas on the moon
waiting, how long, how long now, for the return of even so much
as a single dropp of all the rivers we’ve lost, we go on
yearning to embrace o not just
the fragile vase of her body crammed with flowers,
or the pillar of his, adorned by passionate torches,
but the mystery of the night and the slumped hills
disappearing into the bird-voice of the distance, we go on
aching to have all of it poured insanely into us
like closet drunkards chugging the stars. No feet, still,
we’ll crawl down the coal-road on all fours for a taste of flowing diamond; blind,
yet we’ll paint worlds on the back of our eyelids
and shed them like the petals of peonies
just for a glimpse of the ineffable beloved
always disappearing around the corners of our seeing.
Excruciating razors of pain might slash us open again and again,
clear skies and all their unread, lyrical scriptures
be run through a paper-shredder in hasty evacuations of the heart,
and yet even in the grave, the green leaf of a phoenix wing
stirs, unknowingly, the ashes, so relentlessly are we infused
with this strange and marvelous hunger to love.
It’s easy enough after all these years and weddings for us
to turn the waters of being into wine, but how
to turn the wine into us so that we are always drunk on joy,
the heart an inexhaustible fountain-mouth full of singing birds
because we know, because we have always known, even
before we were born, even before the mind made the body
and we arrayed ourselves as the world,
as rivers, stars, stones and trees, that our very being, every action
and agency of our lives, every breath, every cell,
and the small, silent voice that assents within,
that offers its worldless yes to another, is love, is reality, is
the mountain that makes the valley
it falls from itself to fill. Immersed in love,
we go looking for love with our hands our heads our hearts on fire,
bewailing the futility of the looking, the finding, the losing,
pilgrim waves wandering across an infinite sea of love,
we keep breaking on alien shores in our search for love
only to be drawn back into love. Fish in water
and yet we go on crying out of thirst. How amazing!
Under the stones of ourselves, diamonds; warm rivers of gold,
and even in the clashing of our hardened hearts,
a spark, a firefly, a hundred million stars of love released
like the fragrance of a single flower, or hidden bird-song on a green bough,
love calling out to love so unfailingly
that the whole of the world to the furthest star
is created anew in every second by the instantaneous answering.
That’s what we are, have been, since before
the beginningless beginning of all things, love
revealing itself to itself in the perfection of its own inseparable being,
that’s our original face, our original home, the light-seed
of this orchard world. Do you understand?
This world is so completely, absolutely, nothing but love
that even the darkest sky bends down to kiss the dawn on the forehead,
and not an atom moves in space
but moves burning through the fires of love at the behest of love.
Why look for what you already are; why, impossibly, try
to scoop the moon’s reflection from the water,
hoping to drink immeasurably from love’s elusive madness
when you are already the goblet and the wine, the grape and the vine?
Just this once, turn the light around, and look inside yourselves
as if you were an unmarked box, a secret gift
left on the doorstep in the night by an intimate stranger
and discover for yourself the origin without end
of all your looking. Without thinking, without reasoning
or the torment of why, open yourself up like an orphan’s empty hand
and discover the dark, priceless, living jewel of love
whose mysterious shining has always been the you that is looked for
and the you that has done the looking, love
looking into its own eyes like a star
looking into a flower, or an echo returning to the voice on the branch
that gave birth to it, or here, today,
at this mingling of veils and waters
where love whispers Sam and Simon answers out of the silence, yes,
and soon we’ll all be out dancing together, married to each other unsayably,
ten thousand moons in ten thousand windows,
ten thousand brides of light
in ten thousand grooms of dew
joyfully beyond denial and affirmation
in ten thousand wall-less rooms of light
rippling out through this endless summer night
like the pulse of a single heart, a single jump of the fish,
a small drum of blood beating out in the bright vacancy, dark abundance
of these vast vivid spaces:
not two. not two. not two. not two.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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As If Beyond Death
As if beyond death today,
as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,
the echo of my heart
pumping shadows
through my perfectly preserved corpse
in a silence that's never known the wind,
a fallen wharf without arrivals or departures,
and sad enough not to care why,
blood on the dolphin in the black tide
that pours me out of the horseshoe of the bay
like a road from its boot,
wipes me like the pollen and dust of dark matter
off the windowsills of the constellations,
my unknown mass crucial
to the cosmic contractions
that might give birth to the world again,
and I'm here alone in the high field
drowning in the twilight with the wildflowers
and the sky a last exhalation of the blue-green luster
that flirts with the mystic violet
on a homing crow's head
as the shadows assemble the wings
of a total eclipse
and a new dragon is born of the pain
that shrieks like lightning in the mouth of the abyss,
a torn animal
peeled out of its own skin like an eye
to add its darkness to the furnace of the black rose
that roars in the night
to blood the hungry mirror
with the thorns and talons of clarity,
to feed the wound of its existence
its existence.
And when I walk to the end of myself
through the golden rod and waist-high asters,
the seed of the stars that sleep with the daughters of men,
some of the flowers close up like fists and kisses
and others grasp themselves like a key
to a door that the whole universe can walk through,
and there are strange birds
flying from the eyes
in the rising skull of the moon
that sing like the pyres of cremated guitars
that died like trees in their solitude
and even the gates are weeping like wild dogs.
And there's a wind, intelligent, dark
the ghost of an ancient serpent
horned without ears,
an ocean of mind that exceeds itself like a wave
that howls like a secret it can't tell itself,
like a root blind to its own flowers,
that wants to lead my voice away in chains,
that wants my tongue to try
like a leaf in the updraft of a fire storm
to scream its agony out in the night
so that even the furthest star shudders
with the horror of its final liberation
like an arrow through the throat of a caged hawk.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Within The Midnight Hour
In the midnight hours, my heart
breaks, the fog moves in, wraps
it arms around the morning's
longing wake. The gentle dew
falls from the nights moon, within
the loving fog, my heart
blooms.
The midnight stars fading one
by one, falling from the darkness,
until the night is done. Stars
floating within my sea of tears,
midnight awaiting for my
love to appear.
Gripping the cool night, feeling
alone, lost in the misty fog,
my heart looking for a home.
Crying to the Heaven's, my
universe in pain, moon beams
playing melodies upon my
broken heart strings.
In the midnight hour, your
sweet name I call, the galaxy
crying, losing light as it's stars
fall. Alone in the midnight hour,
my heart, the pain consumes,
within the loving fog, my heart
does bloom.
poem by Ruth warren
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Do
Written by christine mcvie and eddie quintela.
Oh my mind is made up about you
Now and always
Though the seasons come and they go
Nothing will ever change
Well I took a little chance
And I laid my heart down
I thought youd be the one
Who would always stick around
I took a little time
Though I knew it would be
That we had a date with destiny
Well out of the darkness
And out of the long black night
You have given me heart, yes
And you showed me the light
And I do, I do
I love you for what you are
Well this heart of mine
I know it so well
There are so many strange stories
That I could tell
Many is a time
I went out on a limb
You reached out for me baby
And you brought me back again
A lot of stormy nights
Ive seen many a full moon, but darling
This is love in the afternoon
Well out of the darkness
And out of the long black night
You have given me heart, yes
And you showed me the light
And I do, I do
I love you for what you are
So out of the darkness
And out of the long black night
You have given me heart, yes
And you showed me the light
And I do, I do
I love you for what you are
Yes I love you for what you are
I love you for what you are
I do love you for what you are
Yes I do love you for what you are...
song performed by by Fleetwood Mac
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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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
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The Grave Up Ahead Hasn't Chastened My Longings
The grave up ahead hasn't chastened my longings,
nor joy become an offence to the probity of death.
Life's not a protocol I'm trying to master
to approach the eternal orthodoxy in good form.
It's important to bow up once and awhile to keep
your gratitude from growing reflexive. Time
might be the shedding serpent that was generated
like a wavelength out of my flashbulb of a skull,
but I've always kept a good enough grip on its head
to feed it its tail with no fear of being bit. Besides,
who's ever known from the very beginning
whose hour this is for anyone though we blithely assume
we're all living co-terminously. The Pre-Cambrian
just as it is now existed in the Renaissance
or the Middle Ages among the Pre-Raphaelites.
Cosimo Medici greets Dante Gabriel Rossetti
passing through the bus station, eras striating their minds
like glaciers, Viking runes on the back of the mirror.
I analyze my lust sometimes when I think of you.
I muse upon time as a fountain and a gutter in the same breath.
No waterclock is flowing the wrong way.
Winter stars in the heart of the green apple.
Crocuses under the snow. Like our senses, eventually
I came to understand that all four seasons
are wholly focused without distinction on now.
And now can burn a hole through your skin
the size of a third eye if you're not careful.
But as Janis Joplin and Dogen Zenji said
seven hundred centuries apart,
the lucky day is when you discover it's all one day.
And ever since I've been living this moment as if
it were the afterlife of forever and even meeting you
where the rubber hits the road, the print hits the paper
like a graffiti kind of shorthand, seems to me
written in the indelible hand of the unscripted evanescence
that mingles my mind and heart like blood and ink
in the inexhaustible watershed of my art.
Dreams of you. Fragrances of emotion
from these sidereal wildflowers rooted
along the mindstream that gets to where it's going
with no hand on the rudder or wind in the sail.
Are those daylilies or wild irises in your flames?
Deadly nightshade in the umbrage of your eclipse?
How many burning bridges did you have to cross
in the shape of a crucified swan
to get here like the Milky Way without dying?
Pandora's box or the Pierian spring of the muses,
beatific desire in the fire of the witchcraft of love,
or was I born a ghost too late
to attend upon you like a seance,
to get you humming to my unearthly resonance
like the witch hazel of a tuning fork
divining water that breaks
its vow of silence on the moon
to reveal the secret of life is a woman's body
when she reveals it like a sacred syllable
to open your eyes down to the blood roots of her rose?
I taste the air, and I can sense the enormous vulnerability
that is the inversely proportional index
of how potentially dangerous you are to anyone
who hangs their heart like raw meat
on the first and last crescents of your claws
like a sacrifice to ensure an abounding harvest,
like a lure to a mermaid that's never been caught.
Who could take hold of you like the moon by the earth?
The golden fish that swims from one extreme to the other,
depending on where it's being looked for,
jumps into the drifting lifeboat by itself
the same way apples fall into your lap
with no intention on the part of the wind
to knock them down. Whenever I intuit your presence
as if a room just walked into a person,
you're always such a windfall
stampeding through my gut
like mass amorous extinctions making a comeback.
Neuronic lightning flashes along my axons
like the discharge of a high voltage cloud of unknowing
illuminating the black mirror of the midnight lake
that sees everything through its third eye like a sky
whispering stars intriguing enough to make you
want to overhear their voices like fireflies of insight
that can't be attributed to any sign of the zodiac.
And as far as I can tell from what I've heard so far
you could be the proto-nostratic grammar
of a new mother tongue with the grassroots vocabulary of a star
I have to leave more space in my heart than my eyes
to reach out and touch as if even my ashes
were still the green initiate of these immolations
where the mystery burns like a dragon in love
to prove its heretical innocence, and everything
is only as sacred as its taboo is revealingly dangerous.
poem by Patrick White
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And The Rose
And the rose of someone else’s dawn,
a warning to drowned sailors,
mingling in the shadows and the leaves
just beyond the bay of the window where I stand
with my last afterlife
like a star in a shoe.
And there are voyages I’ll never make
and ones I have
for the sake of the going,
for the islands and the witches, the sirens
and the green flames of the fairies
that crept out from under
the stone of my heart
like a crown of petals, eyelashes,
cool palings of fire.,
and danced for the honey and the gold
from the paper hive
softened from stone
they had made of my life in ashes.
And there’s not much difference
between a sky and a sea,
no two wardrobes ever the same,
an expanse of space and skin,
wide palms of water,
and the confluence of lifelines
the deltas and the rivers,
the arteries and veins
the lightning and the branches,
weeping on a windowpane,
the fossils of leftover tears
that winced like an eye
in the hair of the jellyfish
that washed up out of their agony
like rain. And there are fools I’ve been
that don’t remember me
and lighthouses on the moon
that didn’t heed their own advice.
But there was always something
truer in the absurdity,
a mystery or a jewel, the memory
of a face I’d never seen,
some annihilation
with a threshold of stars
I’d never crossed, a whisper
of light, a fragrance, a voice
singing to itself in a lonely place
that put my caution to shame.
And it’s been my life to go,
to cross, to enter, to know
the lostness as my own,
and the darkness and the solitude
where I begin and end
like water taken from the river
and the river returned
as the moorings of the emptiness
I took for a boat
like a face
between the pages of my hands,
and all in the name of some nightbird
some shadow of a wing
that covered my heart
with such a quick eclipse
that no one even noticed I was gone.
Poetry, love, life; the shore is one thing
but the sea another,
and it’s not that I was brave
or thought I could walk on water
or had a secret starmap,
wiser than the rest;
I looked into the abyss with a shudder,
as if I had to kiss
a cobra on the head
or enter a spider’s womb
without being caught,
for the terrible acceptance
of what I sought
beyond the starless gates
and moth warnings
of the usual taboos. Every terror
scales a treasure, and the dragon
masks its secret,
not meant for the circumspect,
in risk. The sane prefer heaven
but heaven isn’t for the sane
who don’t know how to die enough
to answer the sphinxes and grails.
And it’s made me
a heretic of the heart,
a rogue star, a poet,
to live this way,
drinking the black wine
that was offered me
from the skulls
that lined the mouth
of the mysterious death
in the doorway
of every true entrance.
And it’s not the lies
that kill you,
nor the truths,
or looking through
a hole in the fence
at things you were never meant to see,
the medusa making love
to an apple-tree,
or Isis naked behind her veils
that no one’s ever lifted;
it’s returning
the way you came
from the wells
of the transformations,
the mountains of the muses,
the islands and the trees
of seduction and death,
unchanged, your tears still tears
not jewels of the blood,
and your voice,
not the fire of poison-tipped spears.
poem by Patrick White
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Love of Radha, Lord Krishna!
Radha was Krishna's Love,
Nay, Radha was Krishna's part,
Krishna was Radha heart,
She came dancing to tune of flute,
She was breath of his music,
She filled his Murali with Love divine,
He made her spine his flute,
Chakras become seven holes of flute,
played strange notes, became her light and joy,
Sitting below lean against tree,
with legs stretched like kind loving mother,
She took his head in her lap,
Love talked for hours in silence,
Her face Krishna saw in his own light,
And in her eyes his own figure,
In her heart his own face,
Love is that lamp glowing in her heart,
light of love spread whole world,
even the Sun and moon reflected Radha's love!
He became her smile,
she laughed his hearts joy,
She shed tears of his pain,
Never cared for shame and blame,
Never showed shyness,
As her star like love shines
Sound was there companionship,
Innocent she was about his divinity,
He gave his all to her plain love without vanity!
Radha, Radha was Krishna's breath sounded,
Krishna, Krishna her heart danced,
No jealousy no possessiveness,
Radha was great and her love too,
No touch of selfishness, love's spotless devotion,
Pure was heart without corruption,
Her love revolved around Him,
Just as Earth around the Sun,
Or moon around the earth!
Sometimes she was satellite,
Sometimes she is star or planet,
Her love shined in the sky,
Shaded clouds shy red at dawn and dusk,
Golden sun rays of dawn, adorned her love,
white face of high clouds shy to red,
Black low clouds shed tears when krishna was a bit late,
Cooling the burn,
to put off the fire of longing!
Radha was nature and she was filled with Krishna's spirit,
Radha was great to make Krishna Great,
She was her Guru, she became his motherlike at times,
She was friend and guide,
Never enjoyed his downward slide,
He filled her breath in his heart and mind,
Made it wide and light,
Prepared him for his high flight
No internal fight, every thing straight and her heart was ever light
Filled with eternal love's light
She taught every thing in love is always right,
When only heart is light
with love's innocent purity extreme!
poem by Ramdas Bhandarkar
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Faceless This Time Of Night
Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice
into a deepening sense of containment
by a dark space with distant cities of light
trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,
or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles
dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains
across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,
the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars
with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.
The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss
of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard
when you were a kid, the mere filament
of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan
of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,
disappointed it wasn't born a flower,
but a weed more at home among the stars
that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth
like a kindred spirit of light
that must wander through its own solitude
like music at night from an open window
in the life of the mind to reach out to them
like a tendril of smoke from the embering nugget
of the heart nesting in a private crown of fire
that abdicated its empire of ashes for a single note
of the night bird's longing to sing back up
like a bell for a sad universe that's always on the road.
I hear crying in the distance, the dark lament of the hills.
The night creek weeping unseen through hidden valleys.
I can taste the deaths and sorrows, the broken promises
of the rain, drifting like the fragrance of a waterlily
like a star reflected on the undivined watershed of its tears
saturating the air. Matter a condensation of the light,
I can feel life moving through this body, this flesh,
this scrap of starmud, a rush of water, a gust of stars,
a purple passage of blood, a breath of fire and wind,
and the earth, not solid, but real, animating all my limbs,
my vital organs like the ripening fruit of a rootless tree
as if time wept like a bell in me as well, and its tears,
heavy with the weight of too many separations,
yet wise in the ways of the sky, sweetened the fall to come.
poem by Patrick White
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