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What I Would Say To You

What I would say to you if you were near,
if this definitive namelessless that walks me down to the river
to add my tears to the flowing, to sit on my rock
and stare at my self in reverse on a throne of water
enrobed in my star-dazzled solitude, setting fire
to poems I never wanted to own,
every burning lily of paper floating away
like another crown I've set free
from this domain of air and shadows
to seek its own regency, its own unknowable moment of shining,
weren't the eyeless oblivion that engendered us both;
I would say to you in the pyres and the petals
of these wild wounded swans, in the black down and ash
of these exorcised ghosts, in the dream wakes
of these poems that confess their love to the flames
with every exhalation, with every feather of smoke
gone to smudge the sky of the stars that brought them here
in the form of a man, I would say,
it was always the hive of your silence
that was the fairest likeness of you, the bluest honey
rarer than night, I've ever tasted.
And I'd try not to talk too much,
letting the fish jump for the two of us,
and the winged serpents of the luminosity slip away
like things not said into the water
and I'd draw you in under the bough of my arm
that was never much of a yoke
as if you were the fruit of an astounded tree,
and hold you a long time in the vastness
before I turned to kiss you for everything
and fall down back into the silver grass
to make love to you on the moon.
And you in my arms again, your cheek on my chest
your leg across mine, my hand, a wing of tender caresses,
I would mingle blood and starlight
with the wine of your body and being
like a chalice lying empty by the river
that has brought us both to drink from one another
like the deer that will come out later from the grove
to drink from their own reflections. And gestures of life and death
would flutter through me like the red-winged blackbirds
among the scepters of the cattails,
and I'd want to thank and accuse the incomprehensible sky
for this night of being human long enough
to understand its brevity is its beauty
and its brevity goes on forever like you and I,
burnt poems, wounded swans, lovers, indelibly.

Life is suggested to us, never proclaimed,
like the course of the river, as the limbs of the fallen oak
look as if they're trying to swim, and one poem
more enduring than the rest,
floats downstream under a frozen elbow
raised to take the next stroke,
and with a final flare as it comes to the end of itself
levitates up into the air and disappears like a buddha
into the absolute perfect emptiness of an enlightenment
that grasps at nothing. Form
is emptiness; emptiness is form, and the poem
had a good death I suppose as a lifeboat in flames,
and though you're not with me now,
we've never been apart, as the shadow of an unknown bird
lands on the water, and then another,
and I think of them as you and I
arriving somewhere together out of the sky and the night
and the bright vacancy
between the sidereal knots
in the nets of the constellations, to drift among the stars awhile
weary of flying, two poems back from the dead.

And I wonder what love is, knowing
love is I wonder what love is,
as the fireflies flash their assent,
and the cars pass in the distance on highbeam,
and the frogs spring away from their flints. And I come here
as much for the island that spreads the stream
into the waterlegs of a woman
like the orchid of her sex, as to be alone with myself
like a wharf deeply saddened by a thousand farewells,
to launch my fleet of poems
like the blossoms of the abandoned orchard on the far bank.
I like being a child alone on the shores of things,
turning the stones over, lost like a fragrance
among the whispering flowers, ruling my loneliness like a stick, .
and I've always asked questions no one could answer,
awed by the fact of being here at all
under stars I can name like personal friends, but here,
everything's got a mouth of its own to answer,
and the answers seem more timeless for being left unsaid.

And I'm never as old by these waters
as I am anywhere else, and the dusty apricot of the moon
you told me to watch as you would
is always so much more on this undulant black mirror
than a window will ever be able to say to a man at a desk.
There's a birch and three willows
and the third of the three is you
dipping your hair in the water
as if you were trying to root in glass.
And it's no surprise to know you know how
to drink the whole river in a single gulp
and swallow a whole star with your eyes
in a single glimmer
the way a solitary dropp of water
at the tip of the tongue of the stargrass
entirely fits the entire skin of the sky
because I already know how you can consume the whole of me
from the nightsong in the flight of the bird in my voice
and from a single hair of your head,
or the eyelash on your cheek
that is all that separates us now,
from the ashes on the last breath of a single burning poem,
so I can be here with you as I have always been
on the other side of death
where everything in creation
above and below this river of night,
from the furthest galaxy
to the dragonfly on my right
is expanding like a lily of fire into us,
as if we were the emptiness that receives the light.
So it's easy to know where it's all going;
releasing these little fire-boats on the stream,
raising themselves up like the breathless flowers of a dream
rooted in the infinite depths of the knowing,
it's always, like birds and stars and fish
been flowing into us.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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What I Would Say

What I would say to you if you were near,
if this definitive namelessness that walks me down to the river
to add my tears to the flowing, to sit on my rock
and stare at my self in reverse on a throne of water
enrobed in my star-dazzled solitude, setting fire
to poems I never wanted to own,
every burning lily of paper floating away
like another crown I've set free
from this domain of air and shadows
to seek its own regency, its own unknowable moment of shining,
weren't the eyeless oblivion that engendered us both.
I would say to you in the pyres and the petals
of these wild wounded swans, in the black down and ash
of these exorcised ghosts, in the dream wakes
of these poems that confess their love to the flames
with every exhalation, with every feather of smoke
gone to smudge the sky of the stars that brought them here
in the form of a man, I would say,
it was always the hive of your silence
that was the fairest likeness of you, the bluest honey
rarer than night, I've ever tasted.
And I'd try not to talk too much,
letting the fish jump for the two of us,
and the winged serpents of the luminosity slip away
like things not said into the water
and I'd draw you in under the bough of my arm
that was never much of a yoke
as if you were the fruit of an astounded tree,
and hold you a long time in the vastness
before I turned to kiss you for everything
and fall down back into the silver grass
to make love to you on the moon.
And you in my arms again, your cheek on my chest
your leg across mine, my hand, a wing of tender caresses,
I would mingle blood and starlight
with the wine of your body and being
like a chalice lying empty by the river
that has brought us both to drink from one another
like the deer that will come out later from the grove
to drink from their own reflections. And gestures of life and death
would flutter through me like the red-winged blackbirds
among the sceptres of the cattails,
and I'd want to thank and accuse the incomprehensible sky
for this night of being human long enough
to understand its brevity is its beauty
and its brevity goes on forever like you and I,
burnt poems, wounded swans, lovers, indelibly.

Life is suggested to us, never proclaimed,
like the course of the river, as the limbs of the fallen oak
look as if they're trying to swim, and one poem
more enduring than the rest,
floats downstream under a frozen elbow
raised to take the next stroke,
and with a final flare as it comes to the end of itself
levitates up into the air and disappears like a buddha
into the absolute perfect emptiness of an enlightenment
that grasps at nothing. Form
is emptiness; emptiness is form, and the poem
had a good death I suppose as a lifeboat in flames,
and though you're not with me now,
we've never been apart, as the shadow of an unknown bird
lands on the water, and then another,
and I think of them as you and I
arriving somewhere together out of the sky and the night
and the bright vacancy
between the sidereal knots
in the nets of the constellations, to drift among the stars awhile
weary of flying, two poems back from the dead.

And I wonder what love is, knowing
love is I wonder what love is,
as the fireflies flash their assent,
and the cars pass in the distance on highbeam,
and the frogs spring away from their flints. And I come here
as much for the island that spreads the stream
into the water legs of a woman
like the orchid of her sex, as to be alone with myself
like a wharf deeply saddened by a thousand farewells,
to launch my fleet of poems
like the blossoms of the abandoned orchard on the far bank.
I like being a child alone on the shores of things,
turning the stones over, lost like a fragrance
among the whispering flowers, ruling my loneliness like a stick.
And I've always asked questions no one could answer,
awed by the fact of being here at all
under stars I can name like personal friends, but here,
everything's got a mouth of its own to answer,
and the answers seem more timeless for being left unsaid.

And I'm never as old by these waters
as I am anywhere else, and the dusty apricot of the moon
you told me to watch as you would
is always so much more on this undulant black mirror
than a window will ever be able to say to a man at a desk.
There's a birch and three willows
and the third of the three is you
dipping your hair in the water
as if your roots weren't enough for the glass.
And it's no surprise to know you know how
to drink the whole river in a single gulp
and swallow a whole star with your eyes
in a single glimmer
the way a solitary dropp of water
at the tip of the tongue of the stargrass
entirely fits the entire skin of the sky
because I already know how you can consume the whole of me
from the night song in the flight of the bird in my voice
and from a single hair of your head,
or the eyelash on your cheek
that is all that separates us now,
from the ashes on the last breath of a single burning poem.
I can be here with you as I have always been
on the other side of death
where everything in creation
above and below this river of night,
from the furthest galaxy
to the dragonfly on my right
is expanding like a lily of fire into us,
as if we were the emptiness that receives the light.
So it's easy to know where it's all going,
releasing these little fire-boats on the stream,
raising themselves up like the breathless flowers of a dream
rooted in the infinite depths of the knowing,
it's always, like birds and stars and fish in the flowing,
been going to us.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If You Could See

If you could see into the nature of a single thought,
what it really is, though you think you know already,
if you could for one moment as old as the world
stop casting all these handshadows on the moon
as if they were the birds and bedrock of your intelligence,
as if the waves hauled the sea around in chains,
as if the leaves were a language without roots,
you would stop reading yourself like a prophecy in your own bones,
and be brought to your knees like a bull
penetrated by the seven swords of insight
and realize the unwitnessed clarity of the emptiness
that suggested you to you out of its dark abundance
is also the bright vacancy of this world that keeps you company.
All these intimate secrets of yourself
you keep posting to the sky like stars
or the single shoes and milkcartons of the missing
when you go looking for yourself like knowledge
in the eyeless spirit's lost and found;
why don't you, just for once and ever,
treat yourself to a season of your own, and shed them;
open your fist like a tree and let them go into the big O of omega,
hold yourself up like a candle to a black hole
and see what's deep inside
when the world's turned inside out
like a gallery at night without pictures?
If you listen, if you learn to listen deeply
with your eyes and your blood
with the intensity and focus of a hunting cat,
you can hear the crazy keys to freedom
jingling everywhere like flowers jailed by the rain
or the sun held for ransom in the siloes of the brain
the moon ploughs and seeds with thoughts of shining.
Once you stop looking for continuity in the emptiness
you'll come to realize that emptiness
is the fountain-mouth of its own theme
and it's the dream not the dreamer that's in play
when a fish suddenly jumps like a thought
and there are ripples on the moon.
Who comes like an explorer without a flag
before an undiscovered sea of light
and stands before it like a spoon?
Raise the well of your darkest night up to your lips
and drink it drier than the eyes
of the lover who gave up crying over you
once she opened up like the mouth of a river
and entrusted herself like an aimless thought to the sea.
Hold yourself up like the Hubble
to the vastness of the darkness and the shining
to the largesse of the night in its open-handed radiance,
to the imageless wisdom of the mother you don't know
who abides in your seeing like a compassionate shadow
and the intangible mystery of the mother of forms that you do,
and drink yourself down to the last star
to ever lay eyes upon you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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In You

In you I come to the end of roads,
and an alphabet of burning wings
falls from an indigo sky
like meteors trying to write
the unsayable in a slash of light,
in a language of luminous scars
the night beatifies with mystic knowledge
that wants to name you
so deeply in thresholds and stars
the charged silence
is giving birth to an indelible mouth,
a doorway of blood,
an ancient grammar of fire
the wind puts on like a robe
to scry the darkness for a voice
that could fill the goblets
of the moon's dead seas
with the wine of a radiant wound,
so much within me
already the tongue of a bell
that can taste you like blackberries.
The whole of you
in every single dropp of your eyes,
you are the black swan
of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,
the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon
that sways like a bell in the night,
even your absence a shape of cherishing,
a harvest of shadows beyond the light
of the lamp that burns for you.
Within the deepest abyss of myself
where the heart stands alone
like a single black pillar
in the twilight wasteland of the world,
a mysterious temple to the ultimacy
of having been here once
to suffer the passage of form and time,
everything a gesture of space
that thaws back into itself,
I have written your name
in the hourglass of my blood
like a whisper of secret ink
that once voiced the light to be
and shook the stars like wheat
out of its blind abundance
and will be remembered forever
as the first intimacy of the sea,
and there is the rumour
of a dream in the air,
the fragrance of an approach,
that out of an ocean of light
the tide will embody a woman
like the shore of an island
littered with fingertips and kisses
enmeshed like galaxies and starfish
in the exhalation of her veils
and our lips will meet like archers,
and our bodies will sing like arrows
sunk like orchards through the heart
and long after the last flame of life is shed,
the night will silence the birds
in the groves where we bled like poppies
to open the gates of the mystery
like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls
that chants its prayers to the night
like the slow alarm of autumn geese
in the eyes of a human face.
I try to say what can't be said,
pouring my spirit
into the wineskin of every word,
but my heart is a larger apple
than the bough of my voice can bear,
and the silence
that would erect temples everywhere like flowers
spun from the auroral silks of my soul
and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,
every emotion a priest with a shaven head
to honour the moon
climbing the stairwell within me
of a million horizons at once
in every breathless step,
falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship
that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat
or a message in a bottle
that pleads like wine with the emptiness
for an alphabet that isn't in arrears to time
to say you to the night
in a lightning breath of life beyond
these elemental likenesses I carve
from a quarry of stars.
And I know I ask for immortal children
from a human womb,
and wide as my powers are
to exceed the sky with homing birds,
to adorn the dead branch with windows
that dazzle the roots of dawn,
I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,
a stone man with a chain for a tongue
when I try to swim like Atlantis
through the depths of your shining within
and the last word, the last life
to flash across my mind as I drown
again and again like a pulse
in the embrace of your beauty
is always the world as it is
before anything was said.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Wind Wild

The wind wild with jubilation at its escape from the asylum where it's just killed all the windows, but not a flower moves, not a leaf is shed. Come this far, you should know what hour it is, what stars time sifts through its fingers like sand and gold. And though you've stepped away from your face in the mirror, you're still inconceivably reflected in everything, oilslick and orchid alike. And how strange it must seem to touch your own skin and everywhere caress the sky, all wonderful, all a dark radiance without obstruction, a secret night of silver feathering the moon with the cool fires of a forbidden wilderness. And yet this isn't free enough, this isn't yet pouring out the sea to breathe in the light, this isn't eating the dark with your water-mouth and spitting out worlds like seeds. Do you see everywhere around you, now, the worlds? Who but you could they have ever been? And, yes, you have selected a destiny, in assent to this one spontaneity, this one act, a letter in the mail, set all the axes of the planets spinning like a dealer at a roulette wheel. In one dropp of water, the Nile; in one death of potential, birth into a universe that didn't exist before you adopted this exile from yourself into a rage of becoming, whether ashes or gypsies on the moon bathing in their own shadows. Wherever you walk is the way; whatever you say, a school.

Leprous the white fire of the lotus, a pale fire, until it's touched by the wand of the dragonfly, until you drink from the black mirror, the night-well that has never shown anyone their face looking back. Drink deeper than you've ever drowned before, and take the stone embryo of the delusion in your womb to an abortion clinic run by ghosts. At this point all percipients go insane, trying to save the seer and the seen. And the demons that had made a shrine out of every muscle of your body, reflexively catechizing every thought and emotion until you were bound by a theology of yourself, interred in the garbage of your own sanctity, spontaneously understand the invincibility of the sword in your spine, and release hell into effortless obedience to the void, falling, out of joy, to the sky. World disappears, seer disappears and all that's left is a pervasive, unbounded, eyeless seeing, the moon flowing in a dry creekbed. This is the unending return to the source, the unborn cosmos that is the mother and afterlife of itself, all childhoods and every coffin, flowers and fish. Emptiness and form make one hourglass; overturned are they two? What arms to receive the worlds like sand if not this vacancy, this generosity of space being nothing at all? Now, tell me, what hour is it when a clown strikes a bell of water and the sun at midnight shines alone on you?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Journey

I’m on some kind of journey
but I don’t know where it’s going;
I’m growing wings and shedding them,
and I’m true to every thought in my head.
I’ve got a heart, worn down at heels,
a used voodoo doll quilled like a native,
a meteorically battered planet
that wobbles between a kiss and a fist
in the way it keeps running itself around.
I spend too much time alone.
There are no obstructions in any direction;
and barefoot, I’m walking on stars and poppies,
talking to myself like a candle,
weaving my way among the shadows
like a fish through the supple harps
of the silver river reeds. I see
that I’m taking a bath in my own grave
to wash the soiled skies of the painted world
off my eyes, to behold
the brief career of the leaf of life
and how the light gusts out from the windows
like curtains and bird-nets. Life is short
and the new temple never gets further built
than a hole and a single cornerstone, the rest
left to the business of the earth,
all that beauty and magnificence,
unravelled among the mud weavers.
I was inoculated against death
by a splinter of the moon;
by how little time there is for love,
for the root to get drunk
on the fruits of enlightenment and compassion,
by how little I will ever know
of the road to the doorway I stepped through
to stand in awe before the moonspill
on the raven blue waters,
and to look so deeply into the eyes of a woman
who has just conceded an island in her passage,
and the fragrance of unheard music
that I am a pillar of wonder
before the unsayable
as she lets dropp her shadows and feathers of light,
and the blood-god assumes
his flowering crown of fire
to enhance the splendours of his courtly intensities.
What I have lost in the river
I will find in the river
and what I have taken from the sky
I will give back to the sky,
and there shall come a day
when the eclipse will be the brighter mirror,
and the darkness that overtakes me now
will be a gate of stars to a water palace
where the dragonflies and waterlilies
are the sceptres and crowns of a human divinity
that will endure like a whisper of radiance,
a more haunting taste of light,
the rumour of a black rose
that outshines the angels
that coax the lanterns out of the night.
I will evaporate like the flaring of fireflies
on the windy shore of a trembling lake,
like the blue hat plume of smoke
from a gallant winter chimney
into the vastness of my own mind
like a waterbird without a trace into a sweeter, wilder solitude.
And these words will come and go
like the tides of the ocean I was,
like the providential leaves
of unfurling fortune-cookies,
like an avalanche of gold
washed down from the mountain upstream.
I write them in flowing diamond,
I write them in auroras of blood,
in dawns bluer than the iris of a peacock’s eye,
in fire and water and the mystic inks of the night
in the fleeting, indelible dream
of doors and hands and moons,
in warm breath on a cold window,
in a halo of comets
smeared into light by the sun,
in the sidereal wines that bled from bitter wounds,
I have said what it was mine to say
on a page of the wind
that whistled through me like life
greening the sands of the hourglass
with visions that ripened the bell of blood in my heart
to fall like wisdom from its tower
toward a fallible paradise
that won’t leave me as I am for long.
And I will jump again
into this cauldron of joys and sorrows
to string my spinal cord
over the abyss of the guitar-shaped universe,
walking upright
to plead with my own answers
to thaw like a mirror
estranged from the world it reflects
in the self-effacing flames
of the passionate gardens that dance on the wicks.
The awakening seed
echoes these flowers of fire
in the valley of a voice in the furnace
that lies down in the cool grass
by a stream of idle stars
and arrays its vagrant heart
like a breeze of blood in the dust
to the refugees in the shadows.
They move like eyelids
through all the phases of the moon
from an unspooled well of darkness
to the slash of a razor of light
to the threshing of the full harvest
in the siloes of the nightwind
enthroned like a breath of life
in the midst of its own dispersal.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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I Stand Where The Listening Begins

I stand where the listening begins
as if my voice were just another one of the echoes
and my tongue were the tip of an edgy precipice
that doesn't dare make a move
over an immeasurable abyss of eyes
that nobody belongs to.
This is a seeing that's older than the stars
that were born of it
like a mirror is born of the shining.
Like a body is born of the mind
and takes on the shape of a universe
as an expressionist gesture of classical reserve.
In the great ocean of being before it turned into everyone
our eyes weren't beaded like two drops of water
strung through our nose
like a statement we were trying to make.
They were waves.
Waves of water.
Waves of light.
Waves of thought and feeling.
They were waterbirds that came and went
without leaving.
They were meteorological events
in the emotional life of the sea
when it played alone with itself like weather.
We didn't evolve hands to prove we had a grip on things.
We didn't evolve brains to prove we were intelligent.
We're not nuggets of insight
panned from the mindstream
that runs down the world mountain
in a rush of gold.
I stand where I can hear the night
breathing like a shadow in its own darkness
and whatever I am not
is as real as whatever I am.
And my sorrows dropp away
like the black fruit of ruined bells
and my joys know a freedom
no holy war ever deserved.
Here my death answers to my life
and not the other way around.
My beginnings are not justified by my ends
and my solitude is so wholly itself
it embraces everything
as if it were space
and time were its only friend.
This is a poetic state.
A dynamic mode of creative annihilation.
This is a phoenix blooming in its own fire.
This is life.
This is the universe full of bright ideas
that come to it like stars in the darkness.
This is the white mare of the full moon in the high field
with the gates open
like wings growing out of her shoulders.
This is a space that is so spontaneously immediate
that you receive the reply
long before you've even asked the question.
It doesn't take thousands of thoughtyears
for the light to get here.
A flower blooms.
A star comes out.
It's as simple as that.
You lift one veil of the mystery like an eyelid.
Nothing has a history.
The old man remembers nothing.
The old woman forgets her name.
Once they were seabeds of meaning.
Now they're just water.
And everything is ok with that.
People go grey
and turn into clouds in the mountains
just to catch the last of the light
and give their lives some colour.
And then it's night again
and the dancing chandeliers of the stars
that are burning like legends
to make a name and a myth for themselves
fall like constellations to earth
and shatter like the rainbows of youth.
Every dawn has a taste of the sunset in it.
What's the end of anything
if not the dark side of its beginnings?
I am the fool of a freedom
that lets things be whatever they want to be
deep within the heavy fruit of a compassionate heart
that ripens in its own lucidity.
There are worms.
There are birds.
There's a green star in the apple core.
My skin is the chameleon of the sun going down.
I know how to swim through stone and water.
There are fish in my treetops
and birds in my roots
and when I drown
it's the sun in the sea
and nothing ever really goes out.
Everytime I open my mouth to sing
this is where the muse
puts a finger to her lips
to teach me what I'm talking about.
I'm a star when I write.
First I let go of the light.
And then the children point fingers at me
and say in mutual recognition
of the stories they make up on the go
there you are
just as we foretold.
It's the same way with water
when it's lost in a desert of sand and stars.
Sometimes it takes a mirage to find your way home.
Death gapes like the jawbone of a mummy
and writes like a pyramid
as if it wanted to make all things last forever.
But when life picks up the pen
around the fires of the stars
to whisper into its own ear
things that only solitude
can suggest to the night
its poems are always tents on the move.
The moon sailing paper lifeboats down a river
like waterlilies
blooming in the pale flames
of their lunar immolations
as if each were a white phoenix
rising above its own ashes and smoke
like someone dreaming of swans.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Stars So Near

The stars so near it seems the approaching morning
could wet its thumb and forefinger
and pinching their wicks like intimate candles
that have held the lovers close
and the ghosts at bay all night
put them out with a hiss.
An ancient mirror deep within me
I couldn’t bring myself to bury
with the woman who once looked into it
is beginning to flood like a river of eyes with autumn rain
and I want to cry for things
that have departed like water birds
from their circuitous reflections on the mindstream
and leave the heart knocking
like an empty lifeboat against the rocks
that no one sings from now.
I’ve stared at the moon several nights in a row
as if we drank from the same skull
and I want to elevate my tears to a higher level
as a rite of passage worthy of what I mourn
but no lights on in the lockmaster’s house
me and the moon both know
how impossible it is to raise the dead
from their watersheds
by adding a few tears to a dry seabed
out of the largesse of the living
in the wake of so many shadows.
I’m trying to align my third eye like a bubble
in the middle of a balance beam
and build on the cornerstone of the moon
a Taj Mahal of lunar coral to commemorate
the loss of so much beauty
to the things it touched like braille
as if it wasn’t enough just to light them up
but parting the depths of its fathomless veils
open their eyes as well.
I shall turn three times in the silver grass
and stretching my body out like a scar upon the earth
lay down in a deer-bed by the river
with her absence bigger than the night for awhile
and listen to the frogs and crickets
as I used to listen for her footfalls on the creaking stairs
and the moon won’t lay its sword of light on the waters
like a vow of separation to keep us apart
and I shall ask every star
down to the sixth magnitude of time and shining
what has become of her who used to weave
English ox-eyed daisies into her hair
as if she were already among the constellations
showing off the lesser luminaries of earth
as if there were nothing so small
nothing so slighted or disregarded
no moment of life so devoid of inspiration
even the fireflies that can’t stay fixed in one place
long enough to beat a path into a zodiac
and elaborate their own creation myths
into something unborn and unperishing
weren’t enlightened
by the immaculate darkness of her transience.
To suffer everything as if it were a blessing she once said.
I look up through the leafless bough of an aging maple
twisted like a burnt match stick
whose fire’s just flared out.
I look up at the stars
as if they’d built their webs between the branches
like momentary dream catchers.
And I can’t manage it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Not Even The Light

Not even the light of the stars
shining like the keys to the ancient love-letters
bound among the secret jewels
of the queen of heaven
penetrates me as deeply as you do.

The planet wheels into the night
bearing its burden of humans
murdering each other
to enforce one state of ignorance
upon another
as the rabid bees
strafe the demented flowers
on the far side of the world
for enriching their radioactive pollen,
convinced in their madness
more honey than blood will flow from the wound.

I walk by myself
along the brittle banks of a frozen stream
among the detonations of the cattails
waiting like Napoleonic cannoneers
to stoke the charge of the next volley.

The snow in the sunset
is stained a spectral apricot
that disappears like breath on a cold window
and the sky is vast with my insignificance.
Two or three decades of life left,
if I'm lucky,
and though I have tried to use my time
to leave a gift for someone I will never meet,
long ago I realized
there is no way of assessing
what they will find
after the coffin closes like an eyelid
on this long, dark, radiant brevity
that once shone like the moon
in the ores of my blood.

Like the wandering of this rivulet
my heart has always been
a pilgrim without a shrine
and the direction of prayer has encompassed all
like a man getting up off his knees
and walking through an open door
to drink from the cup of his lover
in the shadows of the autumn willow
that sways like kite-tails
from the flights of fire
she ignites among the stars
that gather in the dark like strangers
before their own ghosts.

What the wind
has torn away from me like apple-bloom,
like poems, like smoke and leaf, like skies,
like tears and blood and faith
it has replaced
with these deeper revelations of you
that hang like a windfall of scarlet bells
from the branch of a dead tree in winter.

The wine of your life and light
has matured in the ferocious crucibles of the sun
and you have been poured out
like the passion of a sword
to cleave the stone of my heart
with these truant rivers of wounded silver
that flow through me like blood.

A young breeze
tries to hone the edge of its blade
on the rising moon
as a black ribbon of water
runs like a snake of oil
between the enclosing jaws
and cataracts of ice,
tiny wavelets scaling its skin
scintillant with the small commotions of stars overhead.
The bush wolves
have been nosing for muskrat
and you can almost taste the steam
rising from hot meat on the air.

I squeak like a pulley through the virgin snow,
following the banks of my own meandering,
owing nothing of myself to anyone,
wholly my own solitude,
as I pass through the gates
of the enclosing darkness
trying to enter the abyss and the mystery
of what I have lived so precariously
over the last sixty-three years,
what it means, if anything,
to be a human among these paper birches
on an island in the stream,
looking up at the intimate unattainability
of the stars,
knowing you are growing old,
that death is more populous with friends
than life, that love
has sloughed you so many times
like a viper's skin,
like the phases of the moon,
like a shrine of smoke and ashes,
that the phoenix hesitates
to robe itself in the full glory
of its former plumes of fire.

My mother will die soon.
I must say it,
voice it in my blood
to be able to bear it
and my children are clouds in the world
that no longer look for their reflections
in the eyes of the lake they arose from
as if they were merely breathed out.

And how in any god's name
can a man define the absence
he has grown to be,
except he standardize his own spinal cord
as the only measure of loss
he has to go by?
And even after
all the millennia of my walking,
standing up,
I'm still only six feet closer to the stars
though my mind can embody all of space
in a solitary thought.

And the deep, inner silence
in the empty throne-room of my heart
where even the most profound events of my life
are seen to be ultimately no more
than the antics of a jester
playing with shadows,
turns out after all to be
just another mode of weeping.

It takes a lifetime
for a dropp of water
to gather the courage to fall
from the tip of a blade of stargrass,
and the tongue has tears
the eyes know nothing of.
I admire the cool crimson
on the brushes of the ground willow
as they try to catch my likeness
on the ice-primed canvas of the snow,
but suggest
to portray me as I lived
they need to be loaded with blood not paint.

Like the moon
I have worn the same blossom
as a face
for years now
and I still don't know the fruit
that ripens beneath it;
whether my life has sweetened
in orchards of light,
or black dwarf of the forbidden apple
on a dead tree,
I taste like a full eclipse.

And what could it change even if I did know?
When the diaspora of my starseed
breaks bread
at a harvest of thorns;
who is the host
and who is the guest
and who asks for a menu?

And no matter how far from home
the journey takes him,
whether down a dead-end alley
or further than the stars
was there ever a man
who didn't walk to his own funeral
like a bell
looking for any beginning
that might not be lost in the end?
Or does the snake
that takes its tail in its mouth
as a gesture of eternity
eventually end up swallowing
its own head
like this stream before me
making its way to the sea?

I stepped across a star sill
through a vertical door into life
and in the leaving of it
I shall knock from the inside
on a door that's horizontal
to continue my descent toward earth
down a ladder of thresholds;
and what began so earnestly
among family and friends and lovers
will be concluded by a stranger
who will wear my name like a gravestone.

But here among the tangle
of these fallen trees, their roots
fleshed out
and washed like a corpse
by the water and the snow,
Venus peers through the fingers
of the branches above
where two crows have paired
like quotation marks
around the hearsay of the night
though I am left speechless
by the random beauty of the scene,
as if my voice had been released like a bird
into its own most intimate, inward vision
and that vision were everywhere you like the sky
it disappears into like I do
everytime my heart is opened
like one of the lockets of time
and I stare into your eyes
and the universe stares back
as you breathe out the night with all of its stars
and then I breathe you in
just as a golden feather of the moon
lands without a ripple
or unravelling wake
on the mirror of these lonely, black waters
I have followed deep into the darkness
like the urgent secret of my own lifestream,
and I know it's you. I know it's you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Listen To The Silence

I listen to the silence, not the ambassador birds of the message
aligned along the branch of a black tree,
waiting to have their say, deliver
the formal meaning; I follow them back
to the original fountain-mouth of the silence
that isn't dawn or sunset, or a woman in a garden,
but a clear light with the presence of a feather
and, almost at times, a face, that's always been there
behind the racket and the paint rags
of the cacophonous actors gathering on stage,
the understudy that hovers like a silver fish
in the reeds and the shadows of the undulant curtains,
rarely seen, and more of a fragrance of light
than a second queen, an unverifiable void
with delicate gestures that turn all my questions
back on me like the soft underside of milky green leaves,
as if something took my hand and turned it over
to show me the answers pearled in my palm.
And it would be wrong to attribute eyes to this silence
though I feel it's the space where the seeing happens
in the beginningless moment before
the watcher and the watched rework the seeing up into a play
of heroes, villains, events, and fireflies of awareness
in a chronic struggle of opposites.
And it would be wrong to accord it a mouth, lips, a tongue
because it seems to say everything
without saying anything, without
wounding itself on the quick edge of a word. And there are times
when it almost seems to smile upon my childish efforts
to know what it is, to return to the sea,
to the corals of the moon, with my hands full of cherries and stars,
the abundance of living on the earth
with waterlilies and rat snakes.
It indulges me with the serenity of an old, unknown sorrow
that had to create the world to speak itself to the end
and now sits enthroned in the emptiness of its own presence.
And just when I think I've come up against its impassable clarity
like a fly against a windowpane;
I discover myself immersed in it like an eel
undulating like a free banner of water
through its unpartitioned enclosure,
hardly a wavelength of distinction between myself and it;
and everything I write is an oracle
that swims away knowing more about it than I do
before I decided not to ask it for a name.
And though it may have been the voiceless cachet
of the divine numinosities that opened
the resplendent roses of the past
that squandered their eyelids on asphalt and scripture,
the watershed of the snow-robed mountain gods,
now it's a dropp of water holding its breath like the moon
at the tip of the green sword of the cattails
ready to send a shudder of tears and blood and fruit
through the mirror again like the first pulse
of its falling into existence, hazelnuts into the mouths
of waiting salmon, things losing their balance
against the backdropp of the hidden harmony
by which they are created in the image of their own conception
and known: apple-blow from the orchard
or ashes from the nightshift crematoria.
And, perhaps, this is that silence that seizes the heart with the love
of an unsayable emptiness as infinite as the beloved
that can't be filled by anyone less,
as a question must be returned like a wave to the sea that asked it
before it realizes on the threshold of its own depths
there never was a brevity of being
that hasn't always been the perfect answer.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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My Hands Were Once

My hands were once the afterlives of birds
that caressed the cheeks of the sky
and brushed back the wind from its eyes,
and took a finger to intercede with a tear
not to start a pilgrimage without a little laughter,
and I am of the stuff of three stars
and a fire in my loins
that inseminated space with planets
and wrought red iron into bells of blood,
and leaned on calcium for ladders of bone
and taught the four-armed shivas of carbon to grasp life
and dance for the wheat and the grapes and the poppies,
and man lying down with woman
in waters urged by the fires of thought
furiously rooted in the gardens of the stars.

I am the ancestor and offspring of everything
and even my solitude is the loneliness of the mountains
sleepwalking over their own seabeds,
and the way I love, a trigger of oxygen,
and the way I see, a whisper of time and space,
a feather of moonlight dipped in the ink of the night.

I have within me,
deep in the vaults of my wounds,
swords from the wars of the grass and the trees,
and words that sang like arrows in the sacred groves
to answer why I live and what I'm looking for
and why all my foundation stones are shoes worn out with roads,
and who is it looking back at me like a dark echo in a dream
to see if I'm coming like a shadow with a voice.

And there are mysterious robes lighter than a breath of silk,
auroras and lightstorms, waterskins of the water-walking stars
that have plied themselves like the rings in the heartwood of a tree,
journals of light and rain, to sailor my spirit in a chronicle of flesh,
and be a brief thing in a brevity of eras, to know
why the tiger dies looking into the open, its eyes
yellow lamps in the bluing of the early morning
as if its death were already achieved a breath behind it
and a man crawls toward a meaning on his knees.

All the deaths are mine, the births, the names,
and my heart is the shrine of the moonrise and the dawn,
the blue honey hive of the stars and the wildflowers in their fields,
and the wind takes down what the mute rocks repeat for my sake,
and every face is a blossom or a leaf or an apple from the bough
of the orchard that seasons my emotions to advent and passage,
to the transformative oceans that drink to the bottom of themselves
and leave their empty cups on the moon to be filled again.

I have within me a beginning and an end
that open like the wings of a single gate
I passed through long before the birth of time
like the prelude of a world I hadn't read yet
because I hadn't finished living it in tears and blood,
running my fingers over it like the tender braille of a breast,
lapping it like blood from my own skull to see what kind of drunk I was.

And there are lifelines on the palms of everyone's hands
valleys, rivers, nerves, creases, roots, deltas, lightning
that together make a map to every dream I've ever lived,
all the tragedies and joys of fugitive spirits
trying to shoot the rapids with a broken oar,
and secrets that put a finger to the lips of the dead
like the horizontal threshold of a man who stands
like an infinite pause in the doorway of waking up
and just looks at himself with nothing special in mind,
a commotion of swallows in the radiant spoons of last night's rain.

But there's you now, who is not me,
because I long for you like a tide longs for its island,
and can find nowhere within myself the likeness of your face,
and though I know the water knows you like an ancient migration
it leaves no trace of your vines on the lips of its waves,
and there are skys where you shine among the stars for hours
where I've found threads of your shadow
torn on the thorns of the constellations
like rivers unravelled from your wilderness skin,
and even once I found your footprint like a boat on a beach
but you were not in it, and the emptiness was out of reach.

And I think if I find you, if I look hard enough,
if I stare into space as still as a lizard or a telescope,
if I check every leaf the doves bring back in their beaks,
every eyelid of snow that lowers the pines into sleep,
and lace the wind with fragrant spells and tragic pleas,
if I can break the code of the rocks that ore their silver secrets
like love-letters, like poems, deep in the throat of the earth,
if I grow new eyes for the seeing from the oldest wines of my being,
and the sky has to turn black forever not to have you pale like a comet,
not to lose you like a chandelier of fireflies in a galaxy,
not to reach out and touch you like the creatrix of the creator,
I can part from this life like a gift I left in the night on the stairs.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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All This Stuff

All this stuff going on in my head all the time.
All my fixed constellations changing like fireflies.
All the burning ladders of my unsuccessful siege of heaven
lying down like crosswalks at the feet of the mob.
And the stars that seemed so aloof and untouchable
settling like dust on my eyes.
I want to go home but home itself is gone
and there is no one waiting for me.
I live in these nomadic tents of my breath
that the wind blows through day and night
and everything I touch
though I long for the will of a pyramid
turns into quicksand.
I observe the life within me going on,
this flux of intimate intensities
as if I were no more than the container
and sentient window of a stranger's house
looking in out of the darkness
of my uninhabitable homelessness
that has always been my last known address.
Nothing is ever what it seems
in this shell-game of themes and memes
that shuffles me around like a hard pea
gullible enough to deceive itself
it might one day turn into
the new moon of a black pearl.
But I'm chained by my vertebrae to a slaver
in a caravan of all my wild sides
being dragged like a jungle
toward these civilized coasts
that put everything asunder
that God has joined together
and brand what they sever
with the savage logos of an enforced belonging
that death is the only escape from.
My private cloud of unknowing
with the occasional black lightning bolt of insight
that sets my roots on fire
so that the whole tree becomes its own funeral pyre
and sheds me in flames.
And trying to fit me like a shoe
to the newly washed foot of God
is a vain waste of time for both of us
when you're life's got a hole in it
I keep patching with poems in the cold
or keep stopping along the way to take off
and dump out the pebble of the world
I'm walking on with a limp.
And it's as foolish for a river
to ask where its youth has gone
as it is for me to lament the passage of mine
that I sent on up ahead like water
to keep something flowing behind me.
I don't look for grey hairs in the wind
when it's as clear as grace
that time and space
don't encroach upon the stars like cataracts
and everyone we've ever been
lives on in each of us forever
like water waiting in the open mouth
of the frozen moonskull
for me to swallow and thaw
so that the blossom can flesh the dead branch again
that trembles and bends before the wishing well
that all men drink from like a bell
in this mirage of fire in a desert of stars
to taste the lightning-tongued elixirs of life
that frees the serpent from its scars
like a discarded straitjacket of skin and pain
to go witching for water in hell again.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Undevoted, Free, And Wild

Undevoted, free, and wild,
no one to answer to, no one to answer for,
the urns shattered, and the ashes scattered,
and the fire liberated to perfect its own combustion
and the stars without anyone to walk home,
and the solitude silent, dark, and deep, cool
as the bliss of a wine-cellar talking in its sleep,
I have grown mad in the heat of the purple sun.
I have spoken from the mouths of the caves in the desert
and not expected the echo of my own voice
to return to me like a pilgrim stashing a gnostic gospel
deep in the sand, without realizing
how much closer to the stars dirt is than I am.

When you're no one but the wind in disguise
you don' need to be humble, you don't need to wise,
nothing to trust, and no one to rely on,
you can watch the dead at night
streaming toward Orion
like a blue-white ribbon of light
undoing the gift wrappings off the bodies and eyes
of people who can see and be again.

And you know it comes to everyone
like a nebular orchid with a fragrance of stars,
that the Sahara will green and bloom again
and the wind sing hymns to the grass
and the gazelles sport their elegant legs,
adolescents in the spring brush,
running like violins succulent with beginnings,
and it doesn't matter you're alone out here
listening to the ashes of a mirage
make up legends to tell the fire
about its ancestors buried on the moon anonymously
and how their blood once stained the earth
like a scarlet letter even the stars couldn't wash off.

The mystic anti-hero of my own dragon myth
I exalt in my isolation like a shriek of revolution
and overthrow myself like a book in the flames
to keep something I don't understand alive in me
as if I had to keep on dying to sustain myself
and the distinction between one and the other were lost upon life.
It's a touch, it's a feel, it's a hole in veil
with one eye looking out at me to see
if I've intensified the dark enough to break into stars,
if I can unravel my heart like smoke like water like fire
and perfectly disappear into the atmosphere of my dispersal
without a shudder of farewell to the masks I wore like scales.
Not to be constrained by even so much as
the single thread of a straitjacket, the husk
of an abandoned sanctuary left to the imagination
of the hermetic flowers to do with as they wish.

I shriek freedom across the heavens like the death cry
of a hawk waking the valley up in the morning.
I whisper to the water things the wind was never meant to hear.
So faithful to my calling, I lead those who come, away from me,
as if it were the perennial custom of the universe
to meet like this for a moment in time and space
and then disperse into the darkness alone like a unlit candle.
I'm a riot of fools in the sublimity of the presence within me
that elates the crazy wisdom of my spontaneous ignitions
and schools the black lightning of its absence
in the folly of trying to enclose my spirit in gates
like a candle in the niche of a tempestuous vision.

Yeeeeeeessssss, I scream into the face of nothing
like the efoliant scripture of my confession and protest
that life doesn't need an alibi to live and die by,
no extraneous, no outer, no other, no object, no subject
no flying buttress to act as a bridge
over a flowing river of Gothic stone,
no strong tree standing on its own to cut down
and carve into a crutch, no cork to keep the ocean out,
no bucket to bail the moonlight out of the lifeboat,
no jade Buddha to make your supplications to,
no footprints on the water Jesus walked,
no cave in Ramadan to receive the angel of light,
no Kabbalah to baffle your way through the night,
no Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescopes
on clock driven equatorial mounts geared to the heavens
to thread the golden needle of the mystery
without any knots in your spinal cord,
to penetrate the vulva of the sea like a sacred shell
that once gathered armies on a burning hillside
to contest their revelations with the tongues of swords.

I shall tell you, my brother, I shall hasten to you my sister
like moonlight through your window, I shall not
hold back from you the least shadow of the furthest star
releasing its dark wisdom like the black doves
of its own excruciating ashes glowing like the pain
of horrendous transformations into light.
I shall not bring you the skins of the dragons I've shed
but inspire you with a fire you've never been burned by before,
a spiritual immolation into a godhead without a metaphor
to guide you by, a torch you can't drown in your tears,
a long firewalk down to a river of stars,
and there you shall cross on a burning life raft
of the bones you've been carrying around for lightyears like a body.

And it's a heresy of silence to say, but there
you shall you shall lie down in the nocturnal emptiness
in the long blue seagrass of the moon
and empower out of your own creative abundance
whatever worlds your longing inspires you to embrace
to amuse the bright vacancy of eternity with time, like love,
and the dark abundance of unperishing potential
with space, like wisdom, and the clear light of the void
and the unspeakable absence of any other voice
to ruin the silence with the bliss and sorrow of seeking
the mystic night you found within you longing like a bird
for the stillness to write it like a lyric of the wind,
a passage of blood through the labyrinth of the heart,
a shadow against the moonrise of a compassionate awareness
there's a divinity that sings like a human
in the heart of everything that breaks its long fast of nothing
with praise and celebration, with fire and light and rain
with the firstt sacred syllables to touch the lips
of the black rose charred in the heart of the dragon, like poetry.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I'll Wear This Robe

I'll wear this robe like a desert;
and release the hinges on the gate
that is closing like a rib cage
on the heart of the nightbird
that returns to the silence
like water taken from a river.
I'll pour the moon out of its stone cup
and let this vine of eyes,
this bone of light
wander where it will
in search of a face in the darkness
sweeter than the blood-vows of wine.
These flowers aren't the rags
of the legends of radiance
and a dragon doesn't waste eclipses
on the blind.
The wind opens its hand
and I disappear like a gust of crows
in the startled night groves.
I will drag this empty robe of blood along the ground
like a wounded sky,
a desolate poppy
broken like a kite
on the power lines of its dreams.
I don't know what hurt me;
so long, so long ago I was a child,
and now I am a man, and aging
and the water snarls
and bares its fangs of frost,
and impales my heart
inflamed with grief for so much that has passed
without understanding
on the horns of the moon.
My ignorance has been
deeply authorized by life
and more and more often now
my blood coagulates into roses
and seals my mouth with wax
like a regal mandate
to succeed myself in silence
and let my throne
avalanche down the mountain
like just another rockslide,
another round of asteroids,
another fallen temple
freaked with mystic ore that never made it to the surface.
You ask me where I've been
like a road you befriended along the way,
but I'd have to know where I was going
to tell you that
and I've come to the end of myself
like starlight in a loaf of bread,
a candle that burnt like a voice in the night
to obviate the emptiness,
to warm the abyss momentarily
with the glow of our human divinity,
to say we were here once
like the flower in the field,
the star over the hill,
the face in the window
that watches as we pass
like the shadow of a bird
cast by the flames of a hidden fire,
a pulse of the moon,
the eyelid of a wave
that imagined the sea beneath it
before it broke like a vision
on this shore of flesh
where everything must be abandoned.
I want to be with you
like your eyes are
if you'll let me be.
I want to silver my breath
in the longest night
of your loneliest fountain.
And many have sworn,
and many along the way
have perished like echoes and flowers
at the insistence of a rootless word.
And there have been nights,
eras of darkness and sorrow
drawn from a stranger's well
that have bent the path I took,
and scattered my footprints
like refugees and colonists
that turned native
like an exhausted emotion
when their loneliness went wild and crazy
in a solitude even the moon couldn't fill.
And I have stared
long and deeply into the abyss of the night
and felt the stars stub themselves out
in the sandy hourglass of my ashtray heart.
How desperately
I have rummaged through
this encyclopedia of lives
to find one that wasn't a prelude to tears,
my heart a lost boot,
laced with a snapped spinal cord,
its mouth
muzzled like a junkyard dog
with an elastic band
to keep body and soul together,
only to proofread sky after sky,
page after page of stars
pricked out in braille,
fingering my name
carved in funereal kells and runes
on another boundary stone.
Nothing binds me.
No one wants my heart enough
to consult it like a map
to where I'm buried like gold
under the tongue of a dangerous angel
who wants to wake up beside you
like a spear of fire
I will fall upon like life, like a lover,
to wound my way back into paradise.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Turn Out The Lights

I turn out the lights and lie down to sleep
and you open up within me like a lotus of fire
blooming in the darkness of a vast inner space
that has become my only skin, tattooed with stars
as I play solitaire with destiny, using your Tarot
of chameleonic constellations as a firing squad.

Little threads of joy and fear shudder through me,
revelation and lightning, fireflies going off,
the blasting caps of greater detonations yet to come,
and your face is before me, apparition and aurora,
the moon reflected on undulant water,
a jewel turning in the light of itself, blue eyes, full lips,
the blonde smoke of your hair on your cheek
disappearing somewhere as if a match had just been put out,
and your smile, your beautiful, wide, forgiving smile
that seems to flow from the warmest sugars
of an abundant heart; what dawn over a lake
has ever touched me silently like that?

One look at you and I am hurled into another more spiritual dawn
like a bird bewildered into singing by the strange joy
that threatens to consume him in the soaring radiance.
And though I cannot say you, you are the secret
I discern in the stars when they stop to whisper through the trees
to the bones of the holy man humbled on the hill
of his own insignificance; and then you are the only exaltation
that can raise him up again to shine above the night.

Always within me you summon like a bell; you
draw me out of myself like a genie torn from a lamp; my blood
heaves helplessly to the urgent clock of your tides,
teems with life and washes up on the shores
of mysterious realms where you are always the enchantress of the island;
what man or creature could I not become for you,
immersed as I am in the wine of your being? You are
the fullness of woman in the prime of her mystery, the vase of your body,
the shrine of a human divinity that generation after generation
inspires adoration from the brute
that comes, awed and shy of first fire, to lay pink tulips on the staircase,
grails and goblets gathered to be filled by the reeling honey
of your presence, the fire that burns without burning
and leaves even the wind love-sick and longing for ashes. Human,
you are five petals of fire; divine, one flower.

Break, then, if I must; in loving you, I'll break.
And should you never love me back and the air turn glass
and shatter
into a million splinters of emotion that settle at the bottom of the heart,
the broken wineglass, the crippled flower,
severed from its stem, or the moon,
scoured from its reflection on the eyeless river by clouds,
never know the laughter of your fountain, still
in every fractured piece of me
the whole of your face, in time and out, would shine
as it did in the dark before the light began. You are not a mirage
shimmering over vipers in these circumstantial sands
and I am not a candle in a hurricane. Though I love,
I know the world, its gardens and atrocities, its wounded doors
and urgent windows flowing with lace and longing.
It doesn't have much time for itself, busy as it is,
trying to hide the loss; it's looking for its eyes with its eyes,
its head with its head, its feet with its feet.

I've pulled the thorn from my heart, the worm from the rose,
the nail from my hand. I've gone mad and madder still,
looked up at hell out of the depths of my despair
and envied such exalted heights. And then it's all turned radiant
for no more reason than a dream, something nameless changes,
even as we plan a way into ourselves, or out,
suddenly an unknown light breaks through, and we have our eyes.

One moment of you, one firefly, in the vastness
I was falling through and galaxies ignited all around me;
the dead branch blossomed, the singing bird came
and the day was no longer a spoonful of ashes. Call it
what you will, pour it into any cup, plastic, crystal, or clay,
or drink it from your hands: it's still the wine, it's still the moon; it's still
always and only you that makes this confusion of stars and birds
in the treetops, this picture-music, this drunk dream, this tavern
that is an outcast's shrine to joy
raise a glass
to the sun in his blood that shines at midnight.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Synergy

the weak and the strong
hate and love, religion and science,

night and day, sun and moon,
water and fire, heaven and earth

man and God, sky and sea,
the chasm and the abyss,

flowers and grains, grass and pebbles,
bees and butterflies, song and poems,

prose and stories, paper and pen,
cats and dogs and rains, fleas and ants,

water and oil, stone and paper,
scissors and glass and diamonds,

thoughts and actions, friends and foes,
mountains and plains and valleys,

eels and ladles, pins and sands, thread and
needles, stars and fish, sheep and shit,

silence and noise, solitude and emptiness,
i-pods and beans, cells and phones,

cliches and idioms, foams and fowls, and
come to think, well, don't laugh: you and me.

poem by Ric S. Bastasa
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The White Lily

By the river bank
The frogs croak and caress
Hoping along the river bank
From here to there
At a distant
The swallows twitter with fondness

The lilies rupture with the morning sun
The water reeds sway
As the wind blows along
The river bank

But yet....i feel lost
In this scenery of dexteric desires
I feel caught in lifes pedestals

Tender steps i make....
Along the river bank...
Lilies..
The white lily...
That symbolise
The purity of those souls
Enmeshed in lovesframe

The white lily
That symbolise
The fire that burns within circles
The white lily that symbolises
Long lost desires
Re-invented and rejuvenated
In this river of dexteric desires

The white lily
So white...so pure...

By the river bank
I watch the white lily float and dance
Along the river waters

Their is tenderness in the river
The fishes swim with tenderness
The waters flowing
With a lovers moan

Rythmic drums can be heard from afar
Magic everywhere
I sit and stare at the white lily
With a longing yen....
By the river bank.

poem by Jack Shaka
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Willow-Minded Friend Of Mine

Willow-minded friend of mine
you're the star of Isis in the palm of my hand
that keeps me from drowning in a sea of glass.
How often have I been washed ashore
on the coasts of your flesh
like a naked sailor in an icestorm
of breaking chandeliers
and been taken to see the king
by a princess doing laundry?

A firefly in the distance
might be a great star up close
and your every breath
seed the whirlwind
with golden drops of rain
after the tempest has exorcised its pain
and you grow more beautiful picture by picture
like someone who wants to be redeemed
in her own eyes
for things that only she could be.

But that's not why I love you.
No siren no muse no priestess no witch
no shepherdess of exotic snakes
squirming with the future
like mystic themes around your body
no sacred whore ready to party in the temple
with Minervan night owls and Cepheid movie-stars
that don't want anybody to turn the lights on
to see what's going on in the darkness
they are to everybody,
you are to me more
than I have eyes to see
to the beginning and end of things
but I can feel the night within
flowing like dark energy through space
and tendrils of time growing like paisley lifelines
into something sweeter than the wine
the white mirror drinks from its own reflection.

Before the arising of signs
I can feel your presence moving in me
like unborn constellations playing chess with time
to see who shall be the blossom
who the root
who the leaf
and who shall prime the lightning of the vine.

Long before your veils are parted by no one
like rivers of insight
I can hear your stars
whispering things into my ear
that make whole worlds appear
rocking life in their arms like water.

Time is a mental space
with different flavours.
You taste like the wounded grace
of an eloquent truce with flowers
or as Dogen Zenji said in l238
the lucky day is when you discover it's all one day
meaning one chameleon
turning many different colours
to match the hours it spends
in front of the mirror
that keeps it guessing
who's the seer and who's the seen.
The grass turns red.
The flower turns green.

How long have I waited for you
like a tide on the moon to come in
like the spoke of a tree for a rim of stars
like a metaphor in the chrysalis of a dragonfly for wings
you could see through like a stained-glass window
divining the silence like a witching wand
in a waterless church?

And it's all just been a moment ago
that isn't at the discretion of birth and death
I learned to breathe with you on the moon
like some atmospheric fish
transformed by a new medium
into whatever you wished me to be
when I was the lifeboat
in the eye of the endless sea
that washed me out like a cinder
with the tears of a passing mindstream
as if I got in the way of my own dream
and you?

You were the mystic specificity
as you will always be
in the lunar pearl of it all
that sometimes doubles for my skull.

And isn't it funny how when the night screams
it's always an aurora
that everyone mistakes for dawn?
A snail of a comet smears the mirror and moves on
and it's as good a path as any to follow I suspect
if I had a destination in mind
that wasn't looping in retrograde like a noose.

I may be as footloose and fancy-free as a ghost
but there's no end of this longing
that keeps making me up as I go along
trying to be true and strong
to what I love the most about being dead.

I think of you
and I burn in the terrible clarity
of a light that's never fallen on anyone
as if illumination were endlessly eyeless.
I think of you
like water looking up at the moon as it rises
and I realize the wingless openness
of the dark gates before me
and pass through like a midnight sun
whose seeing evaporates in the morning
like visions and words and waterbirds
that have been transcendentally uplifted out of the graves
of their own reflections.

We are what we need to be to each other
without knowing what that is
like a phantom kind of picture-music
that's always changing its lyrics
to keep up with the mood of the times
whether it's the high definition tunnel vision
of the smokey beekeepers
trying to bring law to the unruly flowers
or the dark energy of an expansive space
driving the stars like exiles
into the absolute sublimity of a starless place
deep in the heart of God
that even creation can't fill
or we're just kicking pebbles down the road together
through clouds of white sweet clover
like afternoon companions of each other's solitude.

Time is the poetry of the eternal
when love sits by itself under its willow tree
and watches the stream pass by
like the flowing eye it drinks from.
I drink pellucidly on the moon
from old grails of sacred blood
like an ark that survived the flood
only to find itself abandoned like a farm
on a mountaintop with two of every kind
except for one

who made his way down alone with the alone
to sing his lover up out of the dead
as if he were missing one of his eyes
and the other had turned to stone.

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Am A Dragon

I am a dragon,
but I’ve got cloudy teeth.
You are a vase among jars,
a feather among scales.
Obviously you are the sea
and I am the seabed.
In the darkness you are the shining.
I come to you
like lead to an alchemist,
base metal to gold.
Already I am transformed
by your mirrors of fire.
There is a light, a glow,
invisible but more illuminating,
not of the moon, or sun, or a star,
but of the heart and mind,
the light of life itself
when it’s the only candle in the room
dancing behind its veil of shadows,
and in the least filament
of the down upon your thighs,
there are suffusions of fireflies and galaxies,
mystic lanterns
ripening like apricots
over the open doors of worlds within,
over eyes that bloom like wild asters
rooted in the earthly fields of the heart.
I have been a ghost
trying to say itself into existence;
and my bread and my blood
have been the whisper and breath of you.
Not the mountains, not
the mothering floors of the wheat seas,
not the forests or the hills or the rivers,
not the ladders or roads or miles between us,
nor the seasons of the threshing clock,
have kept us one eyelash apart;
we have been wings to each other;
we have been the secret tides of the rose
in a bay of blood to one another;
we have been the substance of a dream
that lingers like the impression in cool grass
of where the deer slept the night before.
In the flights of winter birds,
on moist winter days,
I have rehearsed endless summers to come,
when the sky whispered your eyes
in bells of sidereal fragrance
into the abyss of my longing for you
and love seemed a petal of light on the wind,
and you were that petal,
and I was that wind.
And though I have stood for eras
on this bridge of night alone
waiting for you like a letter, an afterlife,
a voice of fire in a well urgent with stars
I want to live with you,
we have always embraced, not two,
arrow and bow,
pilgrim and shrine,
release and enlightenment
reflected in these visions
the insistent palettes of the heart
paint on the impassioned waters
of the deepening lifestream.
I have been a storm of blood and stars;
I have drowned in the crypts of my own tears
and learned to breathe through a new medium,
set the crown of my fin on a rose of gills,
and bloom in a mythically enhanced
immensity of sorrows,
and the shadows under my eyes
have mourned for me
like black bells in a tower of thorns,
two horses of night chained to a heart
that dragged itself around like a hearse
looking for a lost grave.
I buried myself in women
who were torn like the satin lining
out of a coffin just
when they were about to give birth.
Their pain always tasted of an afterlife
that danced like lightning on the tip of my tongue
until my blood caught fire
like a rose with a voice of wine.
Black, apostate, madonnas
of body, heart, and mystery,
even the moon a bead of devotion
on a thread of their blood,
a dream vow under the eyelid of an eclipse.
I never knew what to say
that wasn’t a life shy
of an inadequate skeleton
trying to reflesh itself with the ashes
of its last sidereal cremation.
I was born again and again
like a sword drawn out of a stone
to hurl my humanity
like a sparrow
against the windows and eyes of the gods.
They knew I was right
to live the prophecy
written in the book of my wings by the wind,
but their tears fell like glass rice
on the stairwells of the bridal mirrors
that wept like silver serpents
at the heels of the moon
and whatever road I walked,
whatever direction I wandered in
like a drunken river
I passed through my own ribs
like an opening gate
to a sealess exile on the moon,
a lighthouse to the sail of a ghost in a desert.
Events of the spirit,
and the imported executioners
of tormented ecstasies
that made our bodies shudder with oblivion
until even our shadows glowed
like feathers of light
that glutted the abyss we pillowed like stone
to lay our heads down upon and dream,
every emotion,
keyed like a highwire
over the infinite emptiness
of a guitar in the corner of a tomb
eating the dust of a blackboard
that schooled the scrawl of the angels
into the writing on the wall.
How many lovers have perished in me
like the rings and eras of a tree,
and what enormities of childhood it takes
to sweeten a single ruby of fruit,
what tides of blood and light
collapsing like eyelids on the mystic circus
that pulled off miracles
under the sheets and skies and skin
of our lascivious tents:
now I am a dunce in a wizard’s hat,
a cone of light,
the pillar of a fallen shadow,
freeing the wings of wounded birds
from the nets and mesh of the stars.
I am a dragon
with the soul of a bridge to here and now,
a weed on the stairs of an unknown temple
to a god that sweeps me away like ashes
with the broom of my shadow,
and my face is the footprint of the wind
as flowers are the footprints of the light,
and my heart is a pebble
I keep dropping down a well
to listen for an echo from the depths,
for a whisper of fire on the water,
to deliver me like a burning dove
with a leaf of the moon in its beak,
a letter from you,
to say there is a south of the heart
that can thaw this arctic desolation
that overtakes me like an ageless night
as my thoughts fall away
like the flames of descending matches,
like angels and demons
tilted from heaven,
from the plane of their orbital hearts,
toppled like towers and lighthouses
by an urge to kiss their own reflections.
I am a dragon
chained to the nightrain
that inks the roots of the locust tree
with thorns and stars and flowers,
and my blood is a dusky mess of dawns and ancient sunsets.
My heart was scaled like the moon
by the phases of an empty cup,
my eyes were birdless skies
and nothing flew higher
than the feathered shadows of the trees
that roosted in the grass like water,
and there were no tears left
in the wineskin of the heart
withered like a lily that bloomed for a day,
the soft clarion of a bruised trumpet.
Now I think of you
so many nights and miles away,
and I walk like a bridge toward you,
and my wings are spread out
like the pages of ample skies
that have yet to be written on by the stars,
and I must blow on my longing to be with you
like a spoonful of hot diamonds
just to keep the deserts of my thought
from etherealizing the tropics of my blood,
my eyes evaporating like crucial oases
in the heat of these visions
that burn the air
with fountains of fire
in this tavern of mystic passions
where I drink alone to you,
the furnace of my blood
silked like a black poppy
when I reach out,
a tree in winter,
the afterlife of lightning,
to touch your face like the moon.
I have been a lonely crusade of one
fighting for the gravestone of a dead god
enthroned in the leaf-fire of his falling,
lost in his dream like salt in the sea of the world,
stars in the seed of the apple,
a shadow devoted to the cause of the wind.
I am an era of scars
inspired by the talons of the moon
seizing my heart like a rag of meat
in these elevated bone-bowls of birth and death.
I have been a poet among humans,
an indignant warrior of the heart
with an army of seasoned candles
reconnoitering distant fires in the night
that bloomed like the breath
of insurmountable divinities
gathering like birds
in the border hills of the darkness
that always took the form of a luminous woman
bathing naked in a sea of eyeless windows.
Crowned like an apple star
for the brilliance of my defeats,
I fall like a key of crazy sugar,
a mysterious elixir of midnight orchids,
a squall of renegade stars
into the transformative valleys and bays
of your forbidden paradise,
happier than a fireproof heretic in the flames,
singing into the abyss of an unknown god
that has robed my heart like a wounded boat,
a solitary on his island,
in these auroral tides
that play my blood like the pulse
of this keyboard of light
where I drown like a stone messiah
true to the excruciations of his faith
in these delinquent oceans of you.
All my poems, chalk-dust,
all my mystic nightbirds iron weathervanes
bent by the lightning toward earth
like the forlorn hope of a battered metal,
all my paintings a bleeding and bruising of snow,
and the sincerity of the ways I got lost
in this labyrinth of mirrors
unspooling like a thread of blood
from an immortally wounded star,
an agony of human fire
rooted in the voice of the wind like a bird
the abyss of a night without bounds
squanders on the supremacy
of the oldest silence
time ever distilled from the eyes of the dead,
the perjury of a perishing light,
if I did not love your ashes and orchards more,
the way you tear your constellations
on the thorns of the moon
and bleed like black silk
for an innocence that never found its way home.
I can taste the dark prophecies
and oracles of infernal delight
written in scars on the dangerous mushroom
of your nuclear body,
and flow like the silt of stars,
white mountain gold and night honey,
through the hives and deltas
that enshrine the ore of the rose.
I can prolong the dawn like the wishbone of a note
broken like a harp
in the throats of the singing masters of the flesh.
I can blood the night with a fever of poppies
and scoop weeping diamonds
from the black fountain
in the furnace-heart of an electric glacier.
I can wield ecstasy
like a blade of the moon bewitched by its wound.
I can untie the knots and nooses
in the spinal cord of the butterfly
pinned like a calendar of eclipses,
a quarantined blossom,
to a dead branch under a bell of glass
and wire Eden back
to the infernal nerve of the lightning
that severed the afterbirth of the moon
from the dark mother in the garden
like an angel with a slash of fire at the gate.
I know how to make love
like an embassy of shadows
to the most distant longings of a woman in exile.
I can pour the oil of winged serpents
into the lamp
and entice a ghost of snow
to dance naked in the fire.
I can lead the lost cloud
out of the mountains of the key
to the doorway of candles and stars
enshrined in the skulls of seeing.
And even when I turn my back
on the darkest flowers of fire in my roots
to rise up like rain
into the immeasurable wingspan
of these desert clarities
that bead me like a caravan
of nomadic moons,
no more than a breath of light
in a gust of stars,
I’m still only a ladder of thresholds away
from stealing you away
from the refugees and shadows
that crowd your room
like the night sky
through the astounded vowel of an open window.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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