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What Did You See Just Before You Committed Suicide?

in memory of Heidi Clow

What did you see just before you committed suicide?
Did the snake mesmerize the bird that used to sing inside
your rib cage, turn it to stone, dis the lyrics of its song
with a cosmic hiss that underwhelmed all other sound?
Did you die from the inside out or the outside in?
Was there a light that summoned you to the end of the tunnel
like candles on the hillsides of Blue Skies, or did you
step out on stage in the glare of a bare lightbulb
in an interrogation room where you finally answered
what you were keeping secret from yourself? I won't ask you
to forgive the candour of this if it's cruel. I've been
the kind of demonic fool the earth opens up
and swallows from time to time, so I know
death has its jewels as well as life and when the dark energy
expands your eyes like space, you can see them shine
like wolf's eyes in the black mirror of a midnight lake.

And I've always found the brightest diamonds of clarity
that could cut through everything like the clear light of the void
in the darkest, deepest diamond mines of my igneous soul.
And I remember the cotton candy clouds of the pink angels
before I jumped from paradise, but that was so many shrouds ago
I've learned to keep my fire at a distance from inflammable hair-dos
that have been backcombed and hairsprayed too much.
I don't graft a crutch to the tree of knowledge
and expect it to bloom. And even when the moon blossoms
on the dead branch, what fruit ever comes of it?

I don't think you ever liked me much, but if push
had ever come to shove I would have thrown my weight
like the mass of a black hole on your side of the argument.
My heart was too much of a stump to efoliate
in the fires of spring and I was autumns away
from the gates of the garden you brought to the door
with flaming angels and untempered swords
that weren't hard enough to fall upon yet,
but you were in love with my room mate for awhile
and I gave up my studio to the two of you
so you could both work the guile and wile and style
of your respective arts like alchemical spells upon each other
while I retired to the living room like a benign sunset
with a smile on its face over the darkening hills
to re-read Spengler's Decline of the West
intrigued like a ghost at a seminar-seance
by the morphology of knowledge forms based on metaphors.

And I remember you coming over once,
bombed on Fireball Whiskey, grabbing the neck
of the half-finished bottle like an unexploded artillery shell
and falling backwards over a table into a large rubber plant
as you collapsed like a laughing inferno that bounced back
in adolescent tears as we picked you up like a circus tent
or an emergency parachute that didn't open in time,
covered in potting soil, as you apologized over-crucially
about the slashes and striations that scored a painting of mine
I finally repaired years later with scars of pthalo blue after you died.

And I thought of you as a high wire act on your spinal cord that night
as I mixed the luminosity and values of the hues
on a palette that seemed like a small, sacrificial altar to you
of my grief and affection in the crazy wisdom of a human insight
into the nature of the tragic follies of love and life and how
we endear loss to ourselves like wounds, like graves, like flowers
we inflict upon the heart in such a way they'll never close
because the sorrow is what binds you to us
like a rose to the thorns in our bloodstream.

And then all your friends came over in a squall of concern
as Spengler and I went and stood by the large bay windows
and looked out into a vast night we knew we'd never understand
as you poured your beauty and passion, darkness and doubts
out on the couch in a flashflood of tears and alcohol, realization and laughter.

Only ever saw you in passing after that and sometimes
you'd say hello back and sometimes you wouldn't
as you seemed embedded in some kind of tempestuous trance
oblivious to the world as you danced around your own fire
deep inside, though I never thought it was any of my business
to guess what it was you were praying for or whether
you were firewalking a warpath into the military as I later
heard you did and thought how strange that such a dancer
should want to learn to march and even Spengler didn't have an answer.

Or I'd watch you from the Perth Restaurant, strutting your stuff
up Gore Street like a model on a runway, range-finding
the effects of your cosmetics and high heels and auburn hair
on an encampment of your boyfriends absent without leave.
But I never saw you, rare for the young women of this town,
being led around by a donkey like an eagle on a leash
and by that I knew the intensity of your vulnerable independence
and the savage innocence of a passionate heart in the wilderness.
Then, I forget who told me, but in a single sentence, you were dead.
An ice storm had shattered the rose like a crashing chandelier
and blunted all its thorns like those stilettoes you used to wear
The dance, the strut, the march was over. Late frost
on an early metaphor for the springtime coming into its prime.

But I need to know, when you fell into the black hole
did it turn into the fountainmouth of a white one on the other side
of a whole new universe that hadn't grown as old and blind as this one?
Teach me the signs so I can rearrange the stars in time
like new astrolabes and starmaps to keep the Milky Way
from turning into the Great Barrier Reef that rips the hull
out of the lifeboat of the moon as it passes over
the brain coral and starmud of other shipwrecked minds
that put to sea looking for salvation in the oceans of the rose
only to return like salvage from the storm washed up
on these isolated shores of haunted islands in the mindstream.

Unborn, unperishing, I believe we're all here indelibly
because you can't pour the universe out of the universe
or where's it going to go, and since the whole is in every part,
that includes you and I and everyone in one way or another
eternally. Is it so, Heidi? Do we move like waterclocks
from world to world, our eyes evaporate into the light
because whatever form we take, fireflies or lightning,
we are, perennially, the shining of our own unique insight
by which the light is known by the light we cast upon it?

That we're the light by which the stars are known
and those immensities in which we hold them deep inside,
as now we do you who have added yourself to the whole
so expansively we must grow like space to keep up with you
and the way we humanize the unknown, as the stars do
like lanterns entering a dark room, is to embrace it as intimately
as you have like the available dimension of a future
we've all been moving into like supernovas and galaxies
from the beginningless beginning of all things, tomorrow
like yesterday, here, now, as you are, and have always been
as if the history of seeing were the biography of the light
that blossoms in each of us like wildflowers in the starfields,
or in every wild rose, as you were, the incarnation of a passionate insight,
even in its passage in the autumn when the rosaries
of the Canada geese call as they're crossing the moon
high overhead, transmigrating the souls of the dead
to the thresholds of new constellations hidden under our eyelids
like Venus in the Pleiades near Aldebaran just before dawn?
No death or birth in the moment, like time in a dream,
how can here and now where we all abide with the stars
and the planets and their shepherd moons ever be gone?

It's night now, Heidi, back in Perth here on earth and it's raining.
I'm watching the ripples in the puddles playing water like music
all up and down Foster Street from my upstairs apartment window.
And how the streetlights are dancing in their garish gypsy scarves
barefoot to the rhythm. As I imagine you're doing right now
among similar wavelengths just out of reach of my eyes
Though I can see you so clearly when I see you with my heart
as I do the stars and the willows and the waterbirds
down by the Tay River when I stand on one bank of life
and look up at the other like the far shore of the Milky Way
wheeling like the girandole of the spiral arm of a starfish.

And though I thought of putting poppies and wheat upon your grave,
remembering you were a sailor back in my hometown,
and hope is a lifeboat that keeps us all from drowning in our tears,
it reminds me of you somehow, and I make a wish upon it
like the star of Isis the ancient sailors used to tattoo
on the left palm of their hands to make it through the storm
and had, somehow, come through the squalls of time like you
there in the heights, a water-sylph of the radiance
shining on like that star just to the right of midnight,
breaking through these clouds of unknowing, like Heidi Clow
looking down upon us all on the nightwatch,
whispering like the carillon of the rain, three bells and all's well.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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No Gravegoods In My Solitude

No gravegoods in my solitude, no trinkets
from any spiritual world inside or outside this one.
The totem belongs to the dream that's buried with it
as the flower's engendered by the root it's taken from.
Mind is matter. Matter is mind. And it isn't as if
one is blind to the other because one shore
isn't parted from the other by the flowing
of the mindstream in between. Try to separate
the reflection of the moon from water in a dream state.
The moon is a characteristic of water as the water
is a feature of the moon. If you want to mediate
until you turn the vertebrae of your spine into a bridge
to get to the other side of a life you're already standing on,
that's ok as long as it's burning. Otherwise it's just going
to obstruct your path when you're shooting the rapids
of the Milky Way like your own spring run off
trying to saddle a rush of stars with a rudderless liferaft
and oars for spurs. Better to be a waterbird
with wings of your own, but what a thrill
to ride the snake until you can fly like a dragon
among the stars like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,
in the handle of the Big Dipper like a warrior Bedouin
testing his eyes on the dune of a tribal hourglass to see
if he can tell what hour it is by the dance of a distant binary.

It's getting late. Nightwatch at the well. The town
unpeopled by sleep. A choir of train whistles
practising their inquisitive requiems at every crossing
like Canada geese migrating south when the autumn stars arise.
More lonely than mournful, I can taste the shadows
in the honey of life as readily as the light. I can smell
the fragrance of time like the first snowflakes
in a lover's hair, trying to turn her into a constellation
to sweeten the night air. And even in the ashes
of the starmaps the shining sets afire
and scatters like a library in the urn of the heart
on a wind that carries away the passions of this art
of exhuming more life out of a shallow grave than went into it,
I can still burn in the dark like the ore
of undisciplined diamonds. I can still squander my light
on the eyelids of the fallen flowers like a final kiss farewell.

Time wastes a death on me. Years ago the wind arose
and blew that candle out in the open window
of an abandoned house and ever since I've been
drifting like a ghost of smoke in a diaspora of stars.
I bequeath to the rose, the blood of my wounds.
To the thorns of the moon, my scars. To the night
I leave my eyes. To the wind, my breath. My voice
to the nightbird whose longing put my lyrics
to the picture-music that's haunted me all my life
like the song of someone who loved me once
before I was born and began to forget. But my heart
that I could judge the worth of like a bell bound to the earth,
or a feather of fire in hell, in the palm of my hand,
I give that to everyone like the windfall of a tree in a storm.

Black walnuts and wild apples. Solar systems
of peaches and pears in the leftover orchards
of organic gardens bearing the fruit of a habitable planet
at the autumn equinox of the New England asters
and modest suns of the Jerusalem artichokes
for the birds and the squirrels and the bears.
You can't keep what you won't give away
and it's no good to you in a grave when it comes time
to throw yourself overboard to stay afloat
and weather the squalls on your own sea of awareness
like an empty moonboat drifting through the fog
calling out to anyone who'll listen on the coast
of a new universe that discovers you like Atlantis
to a ghost of the old world looking for a passage
back to the more familiar labyrinth of home.

Liberation is freedom through creative form, not from it.
Liberation is life. And life is all entrance, no exit.
And you weren't asked at the door for any i.d.
And no one's going to stop you from lowering the fire escape
to get away from yourself. And if you were to ask
the mirrors of your own awareness, they'd stop staring at you
as if they'd never seen a new world savage before.
Everyone's going to leave an empty chair at the table
sooner or later. Like the skull cup of the moon
you've got to pour your prophetic lees out upon the earth
if you want to give your abundance another chance.

You can make lanterns out of fireflies in canning jars
or you can abandon them to the spiders
in the corners of your eyes like dreamcatchers and kites,
but if you want to shine of your own accord,
albino fish in the darkest depths with stars in their eyes,
you've got to see the sun flowering at midnight,
you've got to greet Venus in the Pleiades at dawn.
You've got to unsilver the mirror like a stripper
until you disappear like a bird in the house of life
through an open window like a crack in a cosmic egg
to feel the vastness of the sky that transcends
the limit of your wings. Despite the eye-witness
in the mirror, where time is always in arrears to eternity,
you've got to give it all up like your shining reflection
if you want to stay here for your own protection.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If Only I Could Remember You As You Were

If only I could remember you as you were
for a few, brief radiant moments as indelible
as light in space and not as time would have it
the way things have changed. To see you
lingering in the doorway on a winter night,
the snow lying lightly on your hair like the Pleiades
over your shoulder descending below the treeline
as if it knew more about saying good-bye than you did,
and o how I loved you for it. If only I could
remember that lonely ghost of a mirage
that hovered over the watershed of your tears
and looked at me like the first lifeboat
you'd seen in a thousand years respond
to your s.o.s. in a hourglass. If only I could remember
the fragrance of the summer rain on your skin
as if it had mistaken you for one of the flowers
and how I used to like wiping your tears away
with my opposable thumb like plum blossoms from your cheeks.

Eternity coming to the surface of time
like old corduroy roads and bones in a makeshift graveyard.
Not likely I'll ever see you again in this life
but if only I could remember you before circumstance
underwhelmed itself and killed the ambiance
of our last dance by turning all the lights on at once.
But there you go, no help for it. The nightbird
transits the moon and the eternal sky as is said in Zen
doesn't inhibit the flight of the white clouds.
And this moment, too, though it's endured
a thousand deaths to come to this afterlife,
always saying good-bye to some aspect of you
that symbolizes the evanescence of love and life
in metaphors that buff the open wound
like scar tissue on the moon, like fireflies
welding living insights into the dead brain coral
of this encyclopedic coma life
can sometimes seem without you, even after
all these ensuing misadventures it would take a fire
and half a dozen bottles of wine to tell you about
if only I could remember you as you once were
like the lamb that laid down with the lion without fear.

For light years, images of you have flashed out of the abyss
as sharp and quick and vital as moonlight
wielding a sabre, or a bird quickened by a purpose
out of the unknown into the unknown
and I recognize them as blossoms that have blown
far from the tree that was lovelier
than the whole orchard to me, though angels
attended upon it like scripture from its roots to its leaves,
you were the locust tree with your demonic thorns
I wanted to tear my heart on like a rag of blood
on the galactic razorwire that encircled your heart
like a storm of dark matter with unlimited potential
for creative destruction that got the light out of the way
long enough for us to see what glowed behind it.
If only I could remember you as you were
when we both made eye-contact with each other
like exo-planets in the void, and understood spontaneously
it wasn't going to take much of a wavelength
for either of us to understand this immediately
as if we could read each other's shadows like Mayan calendars.

Water hemlock, wild parsnip, sometimes
the memories scald like volcanic dew on bare skin,
but seldom have I ever regretted
that I lived through you for awhile,
when the stars raged in my heart like a madman
obsessed by the crazy wisdom of a woman
who had the wingspan of a bow on a bent event horizon
but knew enough about compassion
to push the burning arrow of my fascination with her
all the way through like a blood sacrifice to love and life
and the mystery that moved in the darkness up ahead
like the fork in the road that separated us,
like a wishbone that had granted all it had to give.

How tenderly painful the brevity of what
we actually relive again as if some moments in life
are illuminated by a different light than that
we read by in bed late into the night
looking for translucency in the windows of insight
that keep on opening their eyes in this recurrent dream
like the black waterlilies of new moons coming into bloom.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Things Might Be Drifting Away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Were The Intimacy

You were the intimacy
of the things I loved
that were so impossibly far away
I could never reach out and touch them
except by touching you.
In the long silence of these past thirty-seven years
I have never been able to look at people again
the way I used to see them before I met you.
There's a fear in the way I love them
that I learned
from living your absence.
A deep black wounded space within
that has sadly outgrown the stars
like October outlives its fireflies.
And every threshold I've crossed ever since
has turned into a long road
with a precipice at the end of my spinal cord
swaying like the first night I met you
on the Capilano Suspension Bridge
and you said
the only way
to overcome your fear of falling
is to have the courage to jump.
And I laughed and said
staring into the gorge
and the thin silver water down below
what's to fear
if you know how to fall toward paradise?
And you knew right away
I was your kind of challenge.
And I knew you wanted
to sword-dance with razorblades
you laid out like the Tarot
later back at your place
as if you wanted to convince yourself
you were still silly enough to believe in tomorrow.
The candle beside the cards on the floor
didn't turn out to be
enough of a lighthouse
to warn us of the approaching storm.
We were sincere in the darkness
for a little while
astounded by the expert innocence
of our mindless flesh.
You shone like the sun at midnight
and I came undone like Icarus
to prove I was falling
without regrets
like a spent star
into the singularity
of a whole new universe
where everything that didn't happen in this one
came uncannily true in the next
for both of us
as if we were at last worthy
in each others' arms
of our own happiness.
When happiness is brave
it's bliss.
And when it's afraid
there's nothing sadder
than a gift that was never opened.
Joy is a warrior that risked hoping
there was nothing left dying for.
Sorrow comes up with a million reasons.
The only way of life
is not making a way of life.
Nor making
not making a way of life
a way.
One day you just get off the road
and start taking the long way home through the starfields.
You stop looking in the mirror
to see if you still have eyes.
For years after your death
no matter what I looked at
I always saw the same thing.
The black clarity
of your existential absence
staring me in the face
without turning me into stone
because that would have been mercy.
Try how I might
I could never quite
shut the lid on your coffin
or accept
that you were buried in me for good
or that my blood burned
like the infernal red
of an emergency exit
to show me the way out
of heaven and hell
by falling on them both
like a two-edged sword
that killed me deeper into life
than your death ever did.
Either life's unfair
or I'm not man enough
to live up to your suicide
but I remember how I used to love
feeling the weight
of the nightstream of your hair
as it poured through my hand
like a landscape that could feel
for the first time in a long time
water running in the dry creekbeds of its lifelines.
Things woke up.
And I saw the flowers
among the thorns
that had been guarding them
like the secret names of God
you had to know
to get past the burning angels
through the gates
of your sad return to Eden alone.
The eloquence of your flesh
when you walked on the earth
as if your heart danced to your blood
like an old song we both knew
now a broken harp of bone,
a wounded guitar,
someone laid down for good.
A prophetic skull
without a future
anyone can foretell.
The full moon going down
like a spare penny
into a dry wishing well.
Me looking at the dark hills
like the contours of your corpse laid out
under a collapsed tent
as they wheeled you into the ambulance
to spend your first vast impossibly long night in the morgue
among the dead
who don't catch their breath
or break their bodies like bread
alone in the stillness
that can't distinguish one death from another.
However I wept for you
all the hard bitter baffled tears
all the sweet radiant wellsprings
that washed the dust like stars
off the wings of the birds
that had laboured to carry the souls of the dead
far to the west
when I remembered
how blessed I really was
that things had been
so beautifully dangerous for awhile.
And all the dark fathomless watersheds of lucidity
I drowned in like a eye in a grail
looking for butterflies in a suicide note.
All the black pearls
the diamond skulls
the eclipsed chalices
all the precious jewels of my grieving
that death hoarded underground
nothing in the end
but nameless water
frozen between the cracks
of a gravestone as old as the moon.
I remember how I loved your ice-blue eyes
and how they burned with an Arctic clarity
you had to dress warmly for
if you didn't want to suffer from frost-bite
but there's more nightshade in them now
than chicory
when I look into them like tundral flowers
and the light turns hurtful and eerie
when I recall how the melting snow
washed itself clean of itself
all those years ago
when we didn't know
what all this meant.
It's of little relevance
that we once loved each other
the way we did
and once you've exhausted
the meaning of signs
like galaxies expanding
ever more deeply into space
less significance.
What does it look like from Mars?
Your death was a koan
not a fortune-cookie
and the koan broke me
like a man it couldn't understand
rationally.
There is no scar for you.
You will always be
this open wound inside of me.
When I look at the stars
I can't dissociate beauty from absurdity.
I cherish their clarity
as something that can't be
contaminated by my eyes
when they're nothing
but two black holes in space
a snake-bite of the light
in the middle of my face
like a colon without the following:
the kind of faith
that makes what little is left
so incommensurably greater than what's been lost.
I can see the blue morning glory in the garden
as if moonlight had turned to skin
just to feel what it's like to flower
but I can't forget the frost
that fell like your death over all of it
when I went so numb
space turned into glass
and time pulled the blind down on the window.
I closed my eyes like a mirror
content to let the stars make sense
of their own reflections.
I gave up on directions
and burned my starmaps
and followed who I was
without caring what I became.
Absolutes of ice
spread like cataracts
over the relativities of the river
that went on flowing
as if nothing had changed
and my life was still a dream without eyelids.
A ghost would be easier to deal with
than the fact
that you don't exist anymore
except as bare bones
denuded of the world
like yarrow sticks
thrown before the Book of Changes.
But then I expect
you'd exorcise yourself
at a suggestion of the night
that the stars would be so much brighter
if you only blew out the candleflame.
You'd do it just to see
if things got better.
You'd leave me in the dark again
staring at the stars
like white ink
on a black loveletter
you left unsigned
as you disappeared into death
like your last breath on a cold windowpane.
I've long since forgiven you my solitude.
I've long since forgiven you
the severity of the wisdom
that hardened my eyes
like diamonds in the darkness
that could cut through anything
except my attachment to you.
I have forgiven you
for the way I have grown through suffering
to realize
how much I owe your death
and the terrible eyeless abyss that followed it
like an enlightened insight
into the impersonal nature of compassion.
I have forgiven you
the way I am spontaneously compelled
to love a world that is so estranged from me
I feel like water on the moon
trying to imagine what it must be like
to fall like rain on the intimate earth
with a reasonable expectation
of coming up flowers
that weren't destined
to be laid on your grave.
I've gone grey gathering them up
and bringing them to you
like bouquets of paints and brushes
that are ready at hand
should you ever wish
to pick them up again
and show me what the world looks like
without a body for a picture-frame
as you play the part of the upstart genius
who lived the black farce of creative pain
like the agony of the wick
burning at the stake like a heretic
between the flesh of the wax
and the spiritual aspirations of the candleflame
thrusting spears into space at the stars
as if the only way you could ever know God
if you ever met up
was by the scars.

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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These Days, This Late At Night

These days, this late at night, I'm usually a lone wolf sage
high above the timberline in a sanctuary of solitude
that occasionally breaks the silence
with the elegaic echo of the anquished shriek of a hawk
wheeling in the abyss like the stars overhead
feeling as if its flightfeathers just caught fire
and for a few brief moments no longer
than the wingspan of a wavelength
it was shining like them and there were jewels
like a woman's eyes cracking the rock
of a heart that's been more of an asteroid
than habitable planet with a few ancestral skulls of its own
for moons and a creative atmosphere where the clouds
can move mountains to tears with the beauty
of what can bloom spontaneously out of nothing
like wildflowers strewn all over the starfields
as if they were expecting someone to come
of the things we really feel are worth crying for.

These days, this time of night, I delight
in looking for the most beautiful nocturnal metaphors
I can compare to you inside and out and beyond both
like a spirit of female serpent fire that haunts me
into paying tribute to her like a muse
who's beginning to possess me like the sea does
when the moon swims out to practise witchcraft
on a lonely island retreat that sings to itself at night.
Even from here, I can hear the song being carried
across the light years like the dove of a deep lament
she keeps like the wind in a locket the size
of the noose around her neck, and the flying carpet
under her feet all that's between her
and firewalking on stars like a burning kite
someone let go of like the umbilical cord
of a lifeboat that had come unmoored in a lunar storm.

Maybe I'm just fossil hunting on the moon
I've been howling at all these years
over the bone pits of dark wisdom I've dug up
on the far side of a black mirror
that doesn't insult your seeing with a night light.
But I swear sometimes when I think of you,
what lies like an archives in the riverbeds
of the sedimentary starmud you put back down
like a book you've read eras of time before,
and look out the window like a door
where you don't have to leave your body
on the threshold like shoes at the edge of the sea
when you walk into your own depths up over your head
to see if your eyes can still swim
with the dolphins and the stars and the flying fish
you left in your wake like a locust plague of urgent telegrams.

I know we're still more strangers to each other
than intimates, that there maybe watersheds
we have in common, and maybe it's still too early
for the fountains to come into blossom yet
as the last stars of the season become
the chandeliers of the morning stars of the next
like dusky candles going out in the blue light of the dawn.
And maybe there are ladders of fire to paradise
trembling like crutches on the edge of a shaky precipice
trying to climb higher than its cloud cover
to break into light like the Pleiades
just above the moon and Jupiter on a good seeing night,
but these days, this late at night, I've been inhaling
a lyrical lantern of oxygen and breathing out stars
like the circumpolar constellation of a healing dragon
pole-dancing with the caduceus of the celestial axis of the earth.

I'm laired with the unmarrowed riddles of bones of my own
I'm trying to read like the yarrow sticks
of a bird skeleton with rose-arbour wings
to see if the light I sense approaching out of the dark
is a mirage of fireflies disguised as a lightning bolt
or the soul mate of a rogue planet
that wants to ghost dance around the third eye
of a first magnitude star that doesn't have any idea
of what I'm doing up here, nor how far
a whisper of light away can seem
to a man fully awake these days, this late at night,
writing in the shadows cast by the candelabra
of a homeless zodiac off the beaten path
like the first draft a waking dream
sleepwalking beside me like the dakini
of a star struck maniac lifting the veils
of the inconceivable like the paint rags
of the night vision shining in the eyes behind them
that even in the dark make everything seem
so incredibly counter-intuitive and lucidly beautiful
I'd be truly out of my mind, like a crystal cranium
that's lost touch with its own translucency
if I didn't find it wholly believable
down to the last mystic detail my enlightened lunacy
howling like a wolf seer at the rising of a new moon
out of a valley where I can hear the distant barking
of the seeing-eye dog that follows Orion around
like a traffic light for the blind compared
to the way you light me up like the Pleiades
whenever I'm trying to get a parallactic fix
on your radiance dancing like a cult of fireflies
on the event horizons of my prophetic skull.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Tenderly The Evening Descends Into A Dark Bliss

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss
and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead
and draws the fever of the day out of the night.
I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.
When I'm burnt, I make a blister
and cushion myself with water,
a more useful approach to tears.
The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances
that thin my blood, but a soft wind
is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.
The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.
I want the stars near enough to overhear what they're whispering.
Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought
as if they were my idea in the first place
and feel humbled and exalted at the same time
by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.
The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I've let go of so much
the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.
I've forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.
Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness
return to surrealistic perversity
to explain the shape of the universe
and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom
of squandering their lives on voices in the distance
leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis
that haunts them like the face
of a beautiful woman they once knew.
Don't we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though
we don't live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch
like dead branches screeching across
an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night
that let's us look at the fire, but doesn't let us in?
Where do you go with your serious spirit
when you've been rejected by your solitude?
Do you know the secret art of being enhanced
by the qualities of anything you're not attached to,
without killing off the desire for what you're missing?
Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart
it's impossible to fill like a grave
that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.
You can be humiliated by your victories.
Coming and going, your path can be strewn
with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.
You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am
savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,
because it includes everything within it
like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.
Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light
or an atmosphere with ocean to match,
this last touch of clinging before you evaporate
into the mystery of everything you're leaving behind.
No more than you can pour water out of the universe
through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time
into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror
you're looking for an image in tonight
in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,
knowing our starmud is just as old as their light
and we're not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.
We're firewalking on water like stars in the shapes
of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable
from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin
we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.
Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,
inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates
that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,
you're vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion
like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.

Don't underestimate the creative potential
of the dark genius of death to come up
with new paradigms of seeing and being
that make us feel we lived our whole lives
confined and blind in the coffin of a seed
that stored a harvest of what we've reaped in a silo.
Out of the dead ore of the moon
pours the white gold of wheat
like metal from a stone in a starfield
that yields more life than can be lost
in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.
Isn't it in the nature of our evanescence to move
like light and water and wind from urn to urn
of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth
like a water clock that runs so urgently
from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding
like the human heart just to contain it
so when the cup's broken like a skull
you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky
in every single dropp of your mindstream
and the stars will still be climbing your roots
up to the flowers within that bloom every year
like a deepening insight at zenith into
the dark generosity of becoming something
even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct.

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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If You Had Any Compassion For Yourself

If you had any compassion for yourself,
others wouldn't have to suffer for you
and the world wouldn't show you
such a sad, woeful, wounded face.
You wouldn't see the withering leaves
and petals of the rose in autumn
as merely the scar tissue of its thorns.
In winter, mend your severance.
In spring, attend to your joys.
Like fishing nets and snow fences.
Like delphiniums in a garden bed
that's beginning to bloom like a starmap.

And you know that stranger inside
that's always witnessing everything we do
like a perfectly clear mirror, even in dreams?
Take another look, you might be surprised
at whose face you see at a meeting of eyes.

It's important not to pass judgement on yourself
for fear of condemning the world.
Show me a mirage that isn't a friend to water
or a wishing-well that resents a rainbow
for the pot of gold at the end, though
no one ever knows which end at the time.

Be kind to your delusive paradigms of life,
as you would an old skin you shed like the moon
when your serpent-fire could no longer contain itself
and broke out of its sacred chrysalis like a dragonfly
that had made itself a house of life out of matchsticks
and went up in flames like a snake with wings.

If you could see your life for what it is,
a teaching device for mentoring your own enlightenment
you might read the books of all the sages
rooted and flowering in you like the wisdom of a seed,
or the star in the ore of a panspermic universe
that was planted in you like the garden you've been from birth.

You might think that the wildflowers
are looking up at the stars to understand themselves
but, in truth, they're looking up at their roots
like rain reveres the lightning that engenders it.

You don't need to convince the wind of your freedom,
you've just got to ride it out to the end,
a friend to yourself, a worthy companion,
the intimate familiar of a cloud with a clear blue sky
or a subliminal lover of the darkness
love mushrooms up in like a moonrise.

If you knew how to nurture yourself
by breaking bread with the spirit of life within you
there wouldn't be millions of children
all over the world who will go hungry tonight.
They'd be licking the spoon with stealthy laughter
like cookie-batter out of the begging bowl of your heart.

Enlightenment isn't going to add one ray of light
or a single star to the night you're already shining in,
and whatever wavelength you're on, regardless
of the mystic polarities your potential flows between,
like dark matter and light, whether the journey you're on
is orange or infrared or the blue white violet of the Pleiades,
absorption or emission spectrum alike, no wave
of thought or mind, light, heart or water
is discontinuous with the oceanic consciousness
they rise upon, so why turn back to the source
like a solar flare to ask for directions from a starmap
that sent you out like a bubble in the multiverse to look for land.
You know, if you were more of an explorer
without a preconceived destination, more
of a space probe leaving the solar system periodically,
the rest of us wouldn't feel so lost or out of place at your table.

And even if you've made a vehicle
of the wheel of birth and death
and think you have a firm grasp on things
with your arm out the window in the driver's seat,
enjoying the passing view with the wind in your hair
without clinging to anything along the way
it still might be a good idea to learn how
to come down off your throne like a pauper
and change a flat tire now and again.

Your life is not an untimely interruption of eternity.
The eternal sky does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds,
and it even bends down sometimes toward the earth
to pick up Venus like a lost earring in the sunset.
It's your point of view that turns your back on yourself
like the retrograde motion of Mars, not
the planet itself playing rope tricks with your spinal cord.

Why go looking for your mind
like a lighthouse with a flashlight,
a flame for the source of the fire
or a star for the constellation it belongs to,
or the homeless for a home when everyone's
the foundation stone of their own habitation
wherever they are at the moment.

If you chase the wind, it will be you
that loses its breath like the atmosphere of the moon.
And when you run out of air, breathe light, breathe space,
and don't try to fix an expanding universe
to your nostrils like a bicycle pump
to get you back on the road again.
Or you'll find you're swimming out of your depths
to run to the rescue of an empty lifeboat
that's already unloaded its contents ashore.

If you don't want to go blind as a starless night
it's prescient to eclipse your blazing from time to time,
turn the lights down low, snuff the candle,
and learn to see in the dark there's just as much reflected
in the depths of the dark abundance
of a black mirror, though it takes time to focus,
than there is in the expansiveness
of the bright vacancy of the white
that takes things in at a glance.
The seed of a every glimpse of insight contains
the whole of the vision in advance,
and at the core of the apple of the issue
is a green star with dark auburn eyes
on the nightshift of the maternity wards of spring.

And o come on now, how long can you hang on
to being this box kite on a string
watching another phoenix ride your thermals
like inspiration on the wing, without feeling
like the premature ghost of yourself at the onset of spring,
all smoke, and no fire, your flightfeathers smouldering
like a pyre of wet maple leaves who haven't got the courage
to break into flames and flap their wings and rise above it all.
Better to be a weather balloon losing altitude like Icarus
or even a candling parachute taking the fall for all of us,
as daring said feathers and falling took flight,
than not risk falling through the black holes of life to paradise?

And what if I were to tell you're they're just the pupils
the light enters through like your eyes into your imagination
to be transformed from a visual into a vision,
the visible form into the invisible shining of the spirit
that raises everything in the known and unknown multiverse,
and the trees and the stars, the rocks and the clouds
are all counting on you to do this for them,
because this is what you're here for,
if you've ever wondered,
to raise them up to eye-level
with a human who knows the names of things
like parents know the names of their own children
running toward them down the street. It's how
we were meant to meet and greet the universe.

So if once, just once, for my sake, your sake, the sake
of the forsaken with their elbows on the windows of the world tonight
watching it all go by like stars on the firewalks beneath their noses,
that are not embedded in cement like a mausoleum
of movie-stars that refused to become fossils
before their shining was spent,
you took a chance, and that's all it would take,
one step forward with no return address,
to risk falling down at the dance,
and seven times down, eight times up,
such is life, get up on your own two good feet again
and discover you've got wings and spurs on your heels
the rest of us wouldn't feel so lame
when we came over to your place
like a riot of erratic fireflies to celebrate
the lightning moves of the rain that's dancing on our graves
where the dead lie down like the corpses of candles
knowing they'll be reincarnated
as wildflowers and Luna moths
because nothing that's ever given its life up
to this business of shining on everything alike
from a first magnitude star, to the night light in the hall
that shoos the ghosts away from their portraits on the wall
so the whole world can bloom in the tears of your eyes,
the fire in your heart, and in the human divinity
of the spirit of your imagination, can ever be put out
because every shadow of doubt
leads back the light that cast it
in love and sorrow, time and space
like the life and death mask of your own face.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Over And Over And Over Again

Over and over and over again
you return to me each time
made more beautiful by the pain
I embrace you with
like the aura of fireflies
in the afterlife of the lightning
that was struck by you.
Over and over and over again
I have watched the birds leave in the fall
and come back in the spring
and whether they were coming or going
especially at midnight when you couldn't see them
high overhead like the souls of the dead
I've always heard the same longing in their call
for something I've never been able to wholly comprehend
except as the way I miss you
on this journey without end
where the destination isn't always
the friend of the road
as the stars foretold it would be.

And I don't know why
I always associate pain with lucidity
like the price of shattered glass
when you hurl the moon through it
from the inside
to let the light in through the damage
and you back into my life again
like the radiant sorrow of a lonely tomorrow
that today already lives in vain
like a weathervane
trying to give the wind a direction
it's never taken before.

Over and over and over again
I have looked for your hidden mystery
in the history of gone
for some living intimacy that lives on
but I've run out of doors and gates and windows
flowers and skies I can leave open
hoping you might find your way back in somehow
from those spaces greater than skin that fit you now
like the dress you were buried in.

The random singularity of death's one demand
might shake the tree
into the soft hooves of the highest fruit
that gallop off like wild horses
spooked by their own windfall into the silence
but over and over and over again
I turn the fact that you once existed
like a jewel I once knew from the inside
into an act of insight
that over and over and over again
rocks me like the aftershock of an earthquake
as if your death weren't once but many
and I would live my way through them all
listening to the geese depart at night in the fall
wondering which one embodied your soul
like a star-bound angel in earthly feathers
and whether you noticed me as you left

over and over and over again
standing in the light by the window
a tiny dark figure down below
listening for you in the darkness
like a vase of full of ashes
wishing it had wings.

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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No Ray Of The Star

No ray of the star in the lead,
none following, no one vector of light,
the compass needle for all the rest.
Eye to eye, side by side,
like the spikes of an onion gone to seed,
companionship and parity,
even after billions of light years,
every one's still shining among their peers.

Even your best efforts
to make it all into one when it already is,
are in musical harmony
like dissonance in jazz
with every wavelength of heart and mind
in a great creative collaboration
with every thread on the loom of a flying carpet
as big as the universe, growing
into the vast expanse of the chaos
it's spinning itself out of like the three fates,
the daughters of night with their thread and shears
severing the lifelines of passion birth and death.

Let them. Because there's a little green thread of love
coiling around your spinal column like serpent fire
that can't be cut by scissors or tears,
a dragon of dna with rainbow chromosomes
riding the stairwells and thermals of its own flames
like a wild grape vine, or trout lilies
down by the night creek
holding up their blossoms
like masterpieces to the stars
apprenticed to their shining
like one genius to another
revealing what can be done with light
when everyone's working in the same medium.

Every star, a kiss on the eyelids
of a wildflower in a far field
that's gone back to seed for a while,
every rose and mushroom alike.

Every ray of light, a mystic spear
through the heart of a disbelieving telescope
that's just had a major revelation
not only about the true nature
of the radiance within
but the ore of the darkness
that includes it like a diamond close to its heart.

Every lucid needle in the haystack,
in the pin cushion of every star,
laying out the pattern of a constellation
like a star map with a ray of light in its teeth,
and every angel that dances thereon,
and every angel that keeps its place under a stone
as a junkie London poet once wrote,
and every demon of a black dwarf
that gave its all and everything up
until there was nothing left but a black hole
or a massive cosmic match head that's burnt out
like the ashen bud of a heretic that bloomed in fire
like the seeds under the eyelids
of the pine-cone of a Zen pagoda,
and returned the universe to the darkness it came from
like a child it discovered wandering
too far from home without a threshold of its own,
is patching the wounds of the sacred clowns
with the whole cloth of the rags they're standing in
with roses and rainbows at midnight
and big ripe tears in a windfall of pears
that keep falling to their destiny
without realizing they're plunging toward paradise
every time they lose their grip on things.

In my unified field theory,
whether you call it fana, nirvana, tauhid,
the godhead, the plenum void, the blaze,
the rapture, dropping off body and mind
once the Japanese plum blossoms
have turned into fruit and realized
no sweetness in the apple bloom
no ripeness in the apple, God,
Brahma on his lotus, Muhammad on Buraq,
Jesus on the cross, Moses on the mountain,
or you've just had a serious falling out with your lover,
in a world so boundlessly unified
we have to resort to stars for boundary stones
like illusory barriers between too much and too little,
where the sweet water meets the salt;
in my intimately impersonal skew
of the crazy wisdom of what's happening here,
the most accurate thing
you can whisper like a poem
into your neighbour's or lover's ear,
is not two, not two, not two, like the vital pulse
of a musical cult of oxymorons
at a gathering of opposites in the wilderness,
everything clings to one another inseparably
like the primordial atom to its table of contents,
like a fish to water, a bird to air,
a star to the darkness, the heart and the mind
to every thought and emotion
of the space-time continuum it works in,
or insight into the mystery that inspires it
to go looking for more grails
than there are ailing kingdoms
to hold them up to their lips
like rain on ripe blackberries
or the full moons of magic mushrooms
because every dropp of rain's a grail in itself.

For every star, an imaginary number
of lifemasks like metaphors
as many as there are flowers
and children of the earth to wear them
as if dressing up for life were the embodiment
of how awareness made its first appearance
like a hidden secret that wished to be known
through an infinite number
of ongoing myriad things all at once forever.

Ergo: we're all in the same lifeboat together
looking for one and the same threshold
in our homelessness like rogue planets
dancing around one another as if each
were in reach of the sun of the other,
sister, brother, and lover, mother and father,
bonded by the light and life
we've all been looking for long before
we were born to shine upon one another like this
as if there were no difference
between the crests and valleys
of one wave and another,
our fullness and our emptiness
on the great night sea of the abyss
that is always as pregnant with us
as it is with the membranous wombs of the multiverse
whenever we kiss in deep hyperspace
and a whole new world gets off on us.

In this realm everyone receives one another
like a gift they weren't expecting
and are never sure they deserve,
down to the last atom of the drunk in the doorway,
the exile in the embassy yard
looking for sanctuary in his own country
by asking you to let him in
like the angel of immigrants in disguise,
like a teen age girl on the sidewalk,
crying like a star-crossed chandelier of rain
shattered like a crystal slipper at her feet
into the plinths and shards of a constellation
you can only see on the dark side of the mirror
like the secret reflection of who she is
inside the locket she hangs around her heart
like the moondog of an innocent suicide
no one would have ever guessed she had in her
like a conversation that never took place, face to face,
heart to heart, when timing was as important as content.

If you hold up a mirror to your own lifemask,
a puddle where the starmud's settled down
like the cornerstone of the moon in a tent
that's comes to flower in the backyard
of a house of the zodiac, you can see in your own face
the faces of everyone who's ever been, or is, and will be,
you will see in the single eye of a seed
how many Japanese plum blossoms had to be
scattered down the street like a Milky Way of the ancestors
you're descended from, to implant their vision
of light and love and life in you. And how
transience learned from the wind
how to let go and give it all away
like the passage of birds and the winged samara
of maples across the full moon, all the fruits
and flowers, stars and seeds of a generous autumn
shaken like the apple orchards of the Hesperides into your lap.

And to begrudge one atom
of this inexhaustible plenty to anyone
is to starve to death in your own garden
is to deny your own children bread
you didn't break with them like a harvest of light
so their darkness wouldn't hunger
for stars the rest of their lives.
Is to live in the shining
and grow possessive of shadows.
Is to break off a love affair with the waters of life.
Is to never feel your eyes ripen from
something green and bitter
into a mirage of wine in the desert
that drinks time spiced with stars
from an hourglass of a blissful delirium
where even the vipers have learned to dance in the sand
among the bones of skeletal keyboards.

Anyway, you get the point, and once
you've got the point, you've got the wavelength by the tail
and you're centered everywhere in a boundless universe
and the circle is as complete as a dropp of rain,
or the growth rings of a tree
making ripples in the heartwood of spring
to give the birds and the stars and the trees
something to sing about they weren't expecting.
That no sum of zeroes ever added up to nothing
as if something were missing from the very start
like blackholes that don't write their names
on the galaxies they make out of their emptiness.
Out of nothing, one, and in that one
that includes everybody you can see
how the zeroes got carried away by the billions
into an infinite elaboration of their radiant vision
of a universe of overlapping circles making waves
and all it takes is one insight
into the creativity of compassion
that steals the breath of the stars away in amazement
that one ray of light from the least expected quarter
when you least expect it is more than enough
to touch your heart with a feather of love
fallen from a passing nightbird above
that has been calling to you all night in the darkness
to see how enlightened everything is as it is
when you open up the black holes
in the wild irises of your eyes to it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Someone Lingers In Your Absence Like An Icon

Someone lingers in your absence like an icon, a gate
to an open field where the white horse
that stood in the tall grass, grazing on its solitude
like a phase of the moon come to earth
is gone. A bird, a purple martin with so much
distance and disappearance in it wings
and the open vastness of the skies it was absorbed by
I can barely hear you singing from here
over the raving of an unkempt wind on a crazy night
when the ghosts are rioting in their graves
like old leaves without attachments at the feet of the new
and gravity receives the grave goods of the tree
as do I these strange epiphanies of you
that haunt me retroactively like apple-bloom.

And the depth of the emptiness that informs
the substance of my imaginings, devastates me
like an eclipse slowly swallowing my heart
like a black cataract of snake skin I keep
trying to shake like a cosmic egg without much luck.

As if I were bleeding out like a rose after
the green thorns have hardened into fangs
that are killing and curing me at the same time.
Some nights I just want to join my emptiness to yours
and be done with it, no more of this, no more.

No more of watching the beauty of the world
burn out into a dark radiance that makes me
want to gouge my eyes out so I can see it without wincing.
Without feeling so wounded by the abundance of the rose
that blooms and disappears like the auroral apparitions
of a widow in veils of spider webs and black lightning,
thinking it might be you under there somewhere I can't go
without losing you again. Check-mate. Pain.
And it isn't anything either of us can do anything about.

It just goes down that way. The absence of your shining,
small nonrenewable gestures of your heart and hands
vividly recalled like modest butterfly volumes of poetry
blowing down an abandoned street at night in the rain, you
sewing a patch on my heart with the delicacy of a needle
mending a flying carpet grounded like a wavelength of light.

As I am now that you've become that rip in my heart
all the stars are pouring out of like a puncture wound
I let go right through me like needles and gamma rays
piercing the heart of a voodoo doll of dark matter
that makes me feel like wooden puppet of light
carved out of one of these black walnut trees.

Endure. Participate. See. Wonder.
Praise. Celebrate. Mourn. Do the next best thing.
And when you're hurting your worst, sing.
And even when I'm soldiering my way through stone
like a flying fish in the wrong medium,
or walking alone with the Alone through the woods,
just to meet you where you ask me to when you call
and I come like a burning bridge down to the river,
wondering if I might have lived here once in another lifetime,
I do say these things to myself like medicinal chants
and preventative medicine, healing totems with benign effect
hung in the medicine bag slung around my neck.
Sweet grass and a pinch of sacred earth, just in case
I forget how to dance on my own grave
with grace and flare and style and an enigmatic smile
that really means it if it really means anything at all.

Or not succumb to this ice-age of a bell
my tongue is stuck to like a child's to a wire fence,
or this black diamond nightbird
that cuts my darkness to the quick
because it's got nothing to sing about
that can answer the call of the living for someone
on a foggy hill to come to the rescue of the empty lifeboat
drifting like the corpse of a dead swan downriver,
except the dead air of this strange place
where space is indelibly bruised by the passing
of the beauty it once contained like stars in a Mason jar.

Like a candle in the lantern of a skull
I've carried before me like a nightwatchman
on the edge of a dangerous precipice for lightyears
until I lost my footing and fell in one night,
as I once did into love, and learned to see in the dark
I was growing wings where I had none before
and looking up from the bottom of an empty wishing well
noticed the dead still blooming like stars
in the white shadows of the sun at midnight.

And out of the corners of my eyes
when what I can't see what need to know about being alive
comes looking for me like the sacred syllable
on the lips of a pearl diver on the moon in total eclipse
like a kiss out of nowhere, comes like the singing bird
to the dead branch in my heart
that's having trouble remembering how to blossom
after a long winter, as if you'd summoned me to the trees
like a purple passage in the Book of the Dead,
to teach me how to take the pain
and through the alchemy of the grief
that flows through my heartwood like light and rain
turn it into life again, as if every leaf
were a new loveletter from the dead
I've been saving for years like expurgated starmaps
illustrated by exiled constellations in Braille
to a spiritual lost and found at my fingertips
where they know who you are, and they've seen you
like a soft moonrise glowing through the willows
down by the river that weeps like a black mirror
for the stars and waterbirds in passing
that appear and disappear each in its time
and you wait for me like the longing of the dead
to make some kind of sign, however simple and austere,
the withered star of a wild rose without a flower,
that let's me know you're near, you're here
rooted in me on earth where we've both come
to renew our shining from the bottom up to the blossom.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Flesh Your Spirit Out In Starmud

I flesh your spirit out in starmud. No creator.
No created. Between the leaf and the sky
I mix the colour of your eyes on the palette
of a rainbow that let's the darkness
sit at the same fire it does. Because the spirit is free.
I hang crescent moons from your earlobes.
I release the sacred deltas of small night creeks
into your veins, and talk to deserts on the moon
about the manes of sidereal lions for your hair.
I search the darkening hills at night for a black rose
with eyelids as cool as mushrooms, and lips,
that are more the wings of auguries, birds and bows
disappearing into the distance to imagine you
than they are the words and arrows
of a flightless heart dipped in stars that don't ignite.

I'm a blind man in a room, painting eyes,
trying to grow flowers out of last year's fragrances,
interpret every syllable and sacred pixel
of your red ochre glyphs of lipstick
I used to bury myself in when I lived in caves with bears
and rubbed the stuff all over my face
like blood and corn flowers under the hearthstone.
Now I'm a dragon rising from my urn of ashes
like a volcano of serpent-fire out of the chrysalis
of my crystal skull, looking for signs, hints, clues,
any whisper of linear B as to who you are
in the shadows of the sundials of the mountains
you go walking with at night with your dogs.

And the stars you must see in the clear-eyed desert
when the temperature drops and all you've got
to keep you warm from the inside out is not
you in my arms, but this small dropp of blood
in our chests, this cosmic thermometer of a heart
on the night ward of a perilous greenhouse.
And I went to a cactus with thorns like a voodoo doll
with oracular powers to ask about the shape
of the body I should root you in like an hourglass in sand
and she said to me, a rootless peach tree on the moon.
And ever since, I've touched your skin
with eyes at the end of my fingertips
like a new world gnostic gospel for the blind
that can see you in the flesh, naked, sublime
like a desert island it would be worth drowning for
just to be washed up on the curvature of your dunes
like a starfish when the mind comes back to its senses
like the first sign of life on the moon in a long time.

You emerge like wild irises of hydrogen out of
this cloud of unknowing, this cocoon of nebularity
like one star among many in an almost perfect vacuum.
I can see you. I can almost taste you. I can feel
your last lover trying to squeeze into the chrysalis
of the infinite straitjacket of your last exorcism
as if he'd finally run out of dawns as alibis
for why he didn't want to leave just yet. Who
hasn't stood in the doorway of Orion
sinking down in the west? For some
the threshold's the longest part of the journey
and they make a nadir of everything at zenith
by letting their horizons down like a crosswalk
waiting for a change of colour blind traffic lights
that don't know, for all that Stop. Go. Maybe so.,
anymore about passage than the road does
or a starmap that always certain of where it's going
but never has a reason why it should
jump the gun like a star and get ahead of its light
like a car on a long dark dusty country road at night,
one headlight out, trying not to hit a doe
in the glare of the sun at midnight
on its way out of town, whether that's up, down,
or omnidirectionally radiant as the Pleiades in tears.

Drift and mingle, merge, enhance,
dance, glance, shadow and glow,
still more ghost around you than I am a mirror,
I know what it means to be summoned to a seance
and not know what to wear. What lifemask to put on
like a Mason jar full of fireflies trying to decide
what constellation has the fewest short circuits in it
and is the least likely to lead anyone astray
when the lights go on and off like a fickle tranformer
or a Cepheid variable that was just born that way.

And here, now, your ears and your hands, your arms
and bones of your own that don't owe a thing
to anyone else's bird cage after the bird has flown.
And now I think I've got the eyes just right
but it's the heart calling its rivers back to it
like the sea I can't quite find the likeness of
even when I appeal to the most ancient galaxies
in the Hubble mirror for a similitude of love
that might serve as the understudy of a metaphor
in an expanding universe that keeps exceeding
the boundary stones of the stars at zenith
and even the chipped cup of the moon full
and a skull that used to juggle mirrors
like shattered insights into reality for those
so spiritually inclined at harvest time to listen
to the blue moonrise peering through the cedars
like an effulgent pearl of wisdom shedding her skin
like a mystic in rapture on the dark side she keeps to herself.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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One Day You Realize You're Looping

One day you realize you're looping,
Mars retrograde in Virgo,
through all the stations in life
you once progressed through,
and the door you return to
is a second innocence
more profoundly seasoned
than the one you first left by.
Everything else in the universe
is regressing ahead in accord with time
like a night sky doubling back on itself
to take its tail in its mouth
as a symbol of regenerative eternity.
Or moonrise. How likely is it
I'm not? That I'm
the only long-haired wavelength
that got straightened out
on a nineteen sixties ironing board
like the girlfriends
I was always waiting for back then.
That there's no twist in my stairwell?
No wheeling red-tailed hawks in my thermals?
No spirals in the sunflowers of my genomes?
No starfish in the bend of my galactic propellers?
No Sufis at the dance. Straight-laced crucifixions
of corkscrews and bottles of wine
that nailed it wrong
and turned back into sober water.
Not a chance. Or as they say in calculus
a straight line is just a special form of a curve.
Ask space. Ask the atoms.
I'm always one step behind my next birth
at an unexpected bend in the river.
You remember that old Etruscan god,
Vertumnus, whose name meant river's turning,
and later, adopted by the gullible Romans
turned into Morpheus, the shapeshifter?
I think the zodiacal kings of Etruria
got it more right
than the perfectionists who keep
trying to get it righter,
and water and light and dream
are closer to my original nature
than this snake of a road
I've been riding like black ice for light years
in a holy war of spurs and fangs,
the sacred thorns of a black rose
in a last duel with the first
and last crescents of the moon.
And as Lao-Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching
what isn't soft and supple
turns brittle and breaks
like a cataract of thin ice
over a flowing lens
it's easy enough to drown in
if you lose you're focus in the rapids.
Even glassblowers must need to cry
real tears now and again
that splinter like rain at their feet.
The fittest cornerstones all do Yoga.
Their twisted like the roots of trees
not a square uncarved block
of disciplined quicksand.
Look at the synchronous swimmers
in the undulation of an hourglass,
the S curve of a woman's figure,
the sign of a long distance snake in the desert
the Egyptians used as a glyph for intelligence.
Can you hear the same creek at midnight I do
whispering its way through the woods
as if it had no one to tell its secrets to but itself
taking the long way home like waterlilies
just coming into bloom
along the banks of the mindstream?
Makes me want to float poetic moonboats
like enlightened shipwrecks down river
when the fleet comes in
like Japanese plum blossoms in Atlantis
with a cargo of koans and haikus on board
that could be easily mistaken for loveletters.
And, hey, whether it's Cygnus above
in the Summer Triangle,
or a black swan on the Ottawa River,
I'm happy to take this trip alone
shooting the rapids of time
like an urgent waterclock
afraid of drowning in a flashback of its life
or a lifeboat full of moonlight
that came to the rescue of itself.
I won't beat the dust
out of the thread-bare wavelengths
of the flying carpets of life like stars
or houseflies that got in the way
of my broken window.
And o when I was young
I used to pray the day would never come
when I would talk like this,
but as the years turn into eras,
you can't help but see
a lot of things in life
some of which you wish you hadn't.
The beauty and the terror.
The candle in the dark doorway
at the back of the morgue,
whose light can go no further
than a prayer for the dead
behind closed eyelids.
Ferry, chariot, or limousine
it's still Charon at the toll gate.
No exit, no entrance,
thresholds of light upon light,
petals of a black rose
blooming in the shadows
on the far side of the moon
like the flight plan of a crow feather
that doesn't consult the tower anymore
for permission to take off and land
and leaves the trees to the night birds
to exorcise their longing
and by their singing,
as their fruits, be known.
Every step of the way
I've stood at the gate of a stranger
that looked a lot like me yesterday
without this death mask on
that doubles as a blossom
of the full moon on a dead branch.
Green bough. Dead branch.
Same song.
And the lights play on
long after the music's over.
You can see and hear it
in the picture-music of the stars
that shine over you even after
both you and they
ahead of your own light
by the time it gets
to where it's going are
are long gone, gone, gone,
altogether gone beyond
firewalking with virgins on Mars
like bridges and crosswalks in transit.
You can't pour the universe
out of the universe
like a fish in a waterclock
that jumps up into your moon boat
at the strike of midnight at noon
to tell you what hour it is
when you know that every hour
every step, every breath,
every river, road, gate and doorway
is a death in life experience of this one.
Not the wounded wavelength
of a heartbeat on crutches
come to a game of snakes and ladders
that can't find anything to lean on
on the opposite side of the river
because the mindstream has no banks
and the bridges go on forever
like the wavelengths of snakes
with their tails in their mouth
going the way they came
like bouquets and fountains,
tears in the valley
that echo on the mountain
like snow at the feet of the stars
back into their deep watersheds
where the dry seas of the dead mingle
with the ebb and neap of the living
like the moon on the waters of life.
And I mustn't forget
as I sometimes do
even when I'm drowning
like a starfish in my own waters
that this flash of life,
this brevity of a firefly,
this lifespan of an insight
into this life, this death,
unborn, unperishing,
is just a galaxy's way
of bringing me back down to earth
without forgetting where I come from.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Have Become My Own Season

I have become my own season
living through these renewable eras of you
that come and go
like the fragrances of passing stars
that sometimes stop by the gate
to talk about the garden blooming late.
Some flowers wait for the moon to open,
to throw their arms around space
as if they could encompass everything
in the brief embrace of their petals,
and their seeing is one eye under multiple eyelids
as they burn like jewels in the night
to keep it all shining and bright.
But I've worn out the elbows
of my insatiable longing
on the windowsills of a different insight.
Saddened by the distance, the time, the circumstances,
delinquent desires still hanging out their shingles
like green apples on a dead branch in winter,
withering like the inconsolable eyes of old men
who have died like sons
and now must die like fathers,
mine is the darker radiance
of the faint halo of light
around a black hole
that summons everything
down into it like the sea
sitting below its own salt
at a stranger's table.
You can't look into
the black mirrors in my house
with your eyes open
because they only reflect
what's on the back of your eyelids
where the only light is your own
and you are the road
and the lantern you go by
and everything you feel and think and imagine
is your own true face without skin
not the gate between outside and in.
How could I ever recognize you
in these dark spaces
if it weren't for the trees
and the stars and the moon
and the night stream that runs through me
like a lifeline on the palm of my hand
down from the mountains
in a rush of diamonds and gold
that pour out like the pent-up emotions
of a sword that's just been pulled from a stone?
And how hugely alone the night is
when you love someone as they are
and you realize without effort
that if you hold them a moment in their transience
you hold them like a star in a locket of water
that tastes like the past.
There are people
like treebound barrels of rain
and then there are people like me
who leak out of their lives
like radioactive water
that couldn't pool the pain
long enough to stop the meltdown
long enough to cool the brain,
long enough to let it kill me.
Now in the darkness
seeded with the dust of black dwarfs
trying to clench a fist of coal into diamonds
my auroras are weeping neon dew
like a cheap enlightenment
all over the watercolours of dawn.
And I'm wondering
what kind of an afterlife is this
that I might have foregone
if I were indifferent
to how my solitude deranges me
like a lost continent
wandering through its own mindscapes
like an extinguished star
that wants to make up
just for one luminous moment
a constellation of its own
that doesn't wait upon anyone's eyes
for the themes of its seeing.
And though the skies have changed
like the slides of childhood dreams
with every blink of an eyelid
whenever night approaches me
and asks to sit by my fire
and let the flames and the smoke
of our past lives
speak for the both of us
I look up to give my eyes
like two drops of water
back to their oceanic immensities
and it's always unattainably you
that is shining
like a woman in the window
of a secret house of the zodiac
far off the beaten path
that leads everywhere like a firefly.
And your stars speak to me
as if my flesh were light again
and my heart
that bumps its way through the dark
already a lamp beyond
the Lazarus of wax
that's buried in his own lucidities
like a candle I left for dead.

poem by Patrick White
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And Though It's Dark And Cold Now

And though it’s dark and cold now
in this ice palace of broken windows
that don’t know whether to bite their lips
or cut their wrists like a suicide
that took it one step too far
like an eclipse that went into exile
I remember the swell and release
of your breasts in moonlight,
rising and falling like a lunar tide.
I remember coiling my finger around
the soft chestnut tendrils of your hair
as if I were dialling a long distance call
to someone I knew light years from here
who was living her dream
like the black sheep of a shepherd moon
she was giving her life up to.
You were an atmosphere on the nightshift
on the intensive care unit of a hospital
applying a cool poultice of moonlight
to the volcanic burns
of more terminal passions
than I ever aroused in you.
Or thought I ever could.
Though time stopped
dead in its tracks like a coma
whenever I was around you
and everything the good doctors
found incurably bad about me
suddenly went into remission,
I knew I was merely
a minor miracle in your life.
Intermission. Time out. One day
every four years to tune up the calendar
A blue moon in late October
after the harvest’s in
and the small birds
are gleaning the rags of a garden.
Canada geese in the cornfields
shredding the last documents
of an abandoned embassy heading south.
We were Indian summer
together for awhile both knowing
the frost would come soon enough
and one morning I would wake up
and look through the window
on your side of the bed
and say, hey, look, it’s snowing
and you wouldn’t be there.
And when the time came, you weren’t.
And I spent the next six years of my life
numb with understanding
in the snake pit of a Zen morphine drip
blessing the beauty of the knife
and the wound you left me with
like a thorn of light under the eyelids
of a new moon in full eclipse.
An eyepatch over the third eye
of an enlightened planet
that felt just like any other
starless night on earth without you.
And though I hurt like a lamp
that couldn’t see you
even when the sun shone at midnight
I knew enough about attachment even then
not to hold up hope
like a cage to the wind.
I never laid a trap line
along the path you took to leave.
I let the silence and the solitude
I returned to like a night bird
to a white-out deep in the woods
efface your footprints in the snow.
I knew I had to stay.
And I knew you had to go.
That one mile east is one mile west
like two feet going in opposite directions
down a road that doesn’t have any.
And though sometimes I look
at the moon these days
and say to myself
what a little scar it is
to cover so much
that’s dark and wounded
about the human heart,
I still haven’t changed the broken windows
I often find myself standing before
to take a long, good, hard,
dark, radiant look at life
to see if it’s still crying outside,
for a thermal-paned, fire-walled website
prophetically updating the virtual weather.
I’m still throwing stones
with loveletters attached to your absence
like the moon through the windows
of a glass palace in an ice-age
I know will thaw by itself in time
like the whirling Castle of Arianrhod,
the hot gem of Celtic heaven shining
in the afterlife of the Northern Crown
down upon these small human acts
of estranged encounters with our own kind
where we meet each other in passing
at the gate of a cosmic garden
that no one was tending at the time,
and long after the one has gone their way
and the other has gone inside.
Long after the flowers have died
that were strewn across
each others’s paths through life
like the spring on a windy night;
no matter how vulnerable it makes us
to being a prime candidate
among many with their sensible shoes on
to firewalk barefoot
on a starmap of burning thorns
into the darkness of enlightenment
to stay attached to the unattainable
the way we both were to the same stars.
Even when the morning glory
overruns the New England asters,
we leave the gates thereafter open
as if the whole heart of the dark matter
of why we love and suffer, bloom
and come to fruition
in the light of each other
as if the aurora borealis
that mystified our nights on earth
with the sheen of cool Persian silks of insight
blowing over the flesh and blood of mystic serpents
then die back into our brief lifespan
like a solar flare back into its sunspots
were still hanging
on one star
one eye
one wing
one prayer
one hinge.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Old Sorrow, I've Forgotten Your Name

Old sorrow, I've forgotten your name,
you've been with me so long, pouring
the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart
that's climbed back up this sad tree of my spine
so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,
these sad planets collapsing in on themselves
under the decaying weight and water of their own tears
from the inside out, and gone to seed
like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,
trying to make it up out of these watersheds
to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard
whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin
climbing back up toward the stars again,
until one night I'll raise my sail
like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way
and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.

Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires
I've danced around alone like the only child
of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold
of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.
Who did you bury that we weep for, what
did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,
what love of yours was so betrayed when it had
its eyes pecked out by the song birds
you never sing anymore when the bees
are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening
the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,
except there's a wound in your voice the lyrics
are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?

Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,
the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells
with oceans of disappointment like the run-off
of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain
after we'd talked to God like bathyspheres
trying to get to the bottom of our tears
like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,
our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope
fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,
looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves
toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?
And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself
when you came back down from your tete a tete,
and returned your commandments like a library book
that was way overdue in Alexandria?

Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons
have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons
as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note
of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar

ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders
are writing music you'll never play like the wind
in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River
when the black walnuts are floating by
like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.

Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud
of all these roads we've walked together to get
nowhere in particular but wherever we are now
in this graveyard of shadows
that talk to the stars who have none
about how to wash our names and faces off
like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness
like a candle at a black mass at high noon
with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won't look at
for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,
you bend my boughs toward the earth
with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature
seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.

Immoveable buddha, are you the ancient echo
of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience
being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms
of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors
you could blow into bubbles of the mind
like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?
Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon
in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted
like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat
growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?
Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind
like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit
like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon
lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.
Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins
of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars
like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.

Venerable exile, do you despair of ever
finding your way home again through your lion gate
or have you encamped like so many other nations
to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?
Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal
that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?
I shall call you, friend, given how long
we've known each other like shadows of the valley spirit
blinded by the sundials of the unaging mountains of the moon.
I shall open my heart like a fire to you
and we can share the silence together for hours at a time
on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside
and there's no need to speak of things
that neither of us understand about why
the fountains with the deepest watersheds
are always sadder than the last of the flowers
in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.
Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,
red shifting into the longer wavelengths
of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,
and I'll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream
that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,
though you probably know better, keep us both afloat
like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock
that's been running a little late like the two of us for light years.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Looking For A Little Black Water After The Fury Of The White

Looking for a little black water after the fury of the white.
Dark energy after the light as peace
settles down gently upon me,
the sediment of the eras and rivers of my life.
And this cool night in early autumn,
a woman in a dark cloak and hood
I could almost caress if I could just breathe
a little more deeply than the abyss
I've been dogpaddling in because
there's nowhere else among all these stars
I can swim from the shallow end of myself
into the watersheds of my last drowning.

And there's an unprescribed silence,
a herb of the moon that's salving the wound
of the lunar thorn I just pulled out of my heart
delicately with my teeth. I'm trying
to tune my spinal cord to the guitar string
of the Tay River, so I can resonate in harmony
with the flow of things. Starfire walking
on the water of the mindstream without
the crutch of a miracle to help bear me up.

It's not so much a matter of power or self-discipline
as it is well within the spontaneous capacity
of everyone's emptiness to do so because,
labour exhaustively as we do just to find the path
let alone stay on it, all we've had to do
right from the start, is to let life
give us a narrative of our own we can be true to
as it makes you up going along with it
like a lonely survivor singing to himself in a lifeboat
at the last watch of the night. Arcturus
at the tip of our eyelashes, enmeshed
as it sinks in a western treeline of beached shipwrecks.

Reach out, but don't grasp. Accept and let go.
Scatter your blossoms, even when you're
down on your luck, like ripped up lottery tickets
whether they end up in the gutter
or on an impressionist table cloth somewhere
playing checkers with a patient still life.
I've seen whole Japanese plum trees in blossom
be brushed aside like perfect haikus
by a street sweeper at three in the morning
when no one else was watching but me and Basho.

My blood is saturated by an overdose of stars
and I can feel a light from deep within
rooting in my limbs like nightfall
as my awareness is enhanced
by how much unknown compassion
there is the silence, love in a dark time.
Blue moons on the wild grape vines,
approaching the autumn equinox in Virgo
as if they could read my mind like a purple passage
intoxicated on the wine that can be pressed out of its own decay.

The waterlilies are gone with the fireflies,
and the reupholstered cattails are beginning
to show signs of wear already. And soon
the Canada geese will be flying high overhead
bearing the souls of the dead to new latitudes of seeing
where the starmaps fall from their hands
like the feathers and leaves of being
flowing along with the mindstream
like the wiverns, wavelengths, and water sylphs
playing on the shores of the Milky Way
with as many burning bridges,
as there are flames on the phoenix
in the immolated sumac, as there are eyes
to see across these circuitous waters
to the other side of where we've always been going
alone together with everyone who's ever come aboard.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Letting The Stars From Last Night

Letting the stars from last night
settle in this morning's puddles
so I can see more clearly once
this turmoil of starmud precipitates out
as mental sediment in a mirror
skybound to a vast blue abyss
and, as they say in Zen, the eternal sky
does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

I want to be a bird that dissipates
in the mauve distance like water in the air.
I want to be a fire whose flames
never stop aspiring to the stars,
though every time they're almost within grasp
they disappear like petals on the wind,
the pages fall out of the book I'm burning
like a sacrificial rose of galactic hydrogen,
and I'm left with a handful of ash
I can stuff my pillow with like the down
of a phoenix in the urn of his worst nightmare.

And being strong seldom helps.
Or feathering your dragons
to convince yourself they're bluebirds.
Strong means condemned to solitude.
Hanging on to the mountain with one arm
to keep it from falling to its death
in the valley it dug like its own grave
in the valley below. Biting the bullet
like a crystal skull until your back molars break
and you're swallowing little flakes of glass
like the beginning of a snow squall
even as you're smiling like a grimace
on a death mask trying to hold its tears back
like a glacier trying to discipline the mindstream.

Strong means you don't use the fossils of other birds
as crutches for your lapwings. Your calender of scars
begins to smile more affectionately at you
as you get older like waxing crescent moons
and this avalanche of meteoric life
looks more like a windfall of ore and apples
with seeds like snake-eyed dice inside
or the seven come eleven of a coal mine
that finally clarified its darkness like diamonds.
When bad news comes you fall on it
like a hand grenade in a daycare center
as you strain to keep yourself together.
Strong means being taken for granted
like the solid cornerstone that can take the weight
of the world that towers above it like quicksand.

Strong means you don't hesitate to eliminate
your distinctions when someone's drowning,
whether they're a fly in a toilet bowl,
Icarus falling out of the sky because his wings
were insincere, Narcissus plunging into his face,
or a siren caught up in the undertow of her song,
you show up like a lifeboat with a lighthouse
full of fireflies for a lantern, words for a rudder
and a star to set sail by and pull everyone in
to your emptiness, happy you've finally found a use for it.

A holy book says that no one's asked to bear
more than they can carry, and it's probably true
from one direction of prayer, but I swear, lately,
one camel isn't enough to shoulder what
it's going to take a caravan on the moon to walk
this cargo of heavy metals to a nuclear dump site
to the dark side where it's always midnight at noon.

One moment there are funeral bells dissolved in the rain
like sugar-cubes of acid in a wishing well
and the next, a spear of insight penetrates my heart
and I can' t tell if it's a pin meant for a butterfly
or a voodoo doll, or as a dance floor for the angels
to learn how to waltz without bumping into each other
like Canada geese taking off from a trashed corn field
as if they needed an air traffic controller and a runway
to bear the souls of the dead west and south
as I begin to wonder if death really is too pricey a ticket
to unload all these camels of their burdens
like sacs of genetically modified bee pollen
I've gathered radioactively from the starfields
so it doesn't derange the hive or taint its honey and flowers,
and travelling lighter than life, go with them.

Yet I know I won't because my heart's
mortared into my Mongol blood like a brick
in the Temple of Life at Samarkand
and I would think of it as genocide
to kill even so much as a single human
who's ever stood nightwatch in a crow's nest
for a fleet sailing into a divine wind.
Sooner or later I'll be washed up
on the event horizon of another black hole
at the center of a galactic starfish
all my lucidities will stick to like myriad universes
nacreously gathering their pearls
like planets and new moons out of the nebulosity
of these lunar sandstorms whipping my eyes
with the radiance of a hundred billion burning stars
that get thrown in my wounds to cauterize
the scream of my fountainmouth hemorrhaging
in the dead silence I keep like a vow to myself
not to shriek out in pain at the arrows
that strike the hearts of the clear-eyed hawks in autumn.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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