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When You Listen To A Bird

When you listen to a bird
you should hear the whole of the sky
just as when you look at a star
you should be a fountain of eyes.

Because you cannot see,
the darkness is not blind
and your consensus of conventional abnormalities
is not reality, is not the source
of the hidden halo of comets that afflict you,
nor the crazy constellations of the fireflies that bless.

I don't know if I speak for anyone other than myself
but that's enough to reflect the moon in every drop
of this unvoiced delirium
that surpasses enlightenment and lunacy like old shoes
to walk barefoot across the stars
as if they were no more than cool sand in a desert at night
that's never been bound to a road,
though every single grain is the cornerstone of the world.

How unsayably me I must be
that so many thoughts and emotions,
so many vital themes of blood and time,
years that have returned their fields to the wild,
have enshrined my namelessness
in this abandoned palace of shadows
I've pitched together like a chrysalis out of words.

A true muse is a well
that finds its own way to your mouth,
and I accord mine the perfect freedom to be me,
and drink deeply of the night she pours into me,
until neither of us knows who the other is
though we whisper like leaves on the same tree.

What's crucial is not to offer yourself up
like a tourist map to the wind
but to let go. To find out where you're going
not by giving up everything that you know,
but the knowing.
I let my thoughts follow the path
of a snowflake in a blizzard
until they melt like eyes on earth
to show my roots how to flower,
this one a waterlily opening
like a diploma in a swamp,
and that, the devil's paintbrush.
Should it be otherwise?

Can you turn your eyes back like a clock
and unsee the things
that have looked so deeply into you
the skull of an impersonal space
wears the atmospheric intimacy of your face
like the ghost of an unknown planet?

I have felt poppies of blood
hotter than any prophetic furnace
rend my flesh like starving lions
for things I never knew I believed,
for the heart I laid down like a sword on the altar
to the inexplicable gods of the misconceived,
when I realized that not even my homelessness is shelter
and the only country under the flag of my blood
that might have claimed me as its own
has caged me like an undocumentable alien
in a holding cell of bone.

But it's foolish to look for passage
when nothing's in your way,
or seek enlightenment with a candle at midday,
not knowing you're only washing a mirror with shadows
and handing out wicks to the stars.

And what's the sound of one hand clapping?
Be compassionate. Be generous. Be kind.
This is the only way to forgive your mind.

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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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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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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As If Beyond Death

As if beyond death today,
as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,
the echo of my heart
pumping shadows
through my perfectly preserved corpse
in a silence that's never known the wind,
a fallen wharf without arrivals or departures,
and sad enough not to care why,
blood on the dolphin in the black tide
that pours me out of the horseshoe of the bay
like a road from its boot,
wipes me like the pollen and dust of dark matter
off the windowsills of the constellations,
my unknown mass crucial
to the cosmic contractions
that might give birth to the world again,
and I'm here alone in the high field
drowning in the twilight with the wildflowers
and the sky a last exhalation of the blue-green luster
that flirts with the mystic violet
on a homing crow's head
as the shadows assemble the wings
of a total eclipse
and a new dragon is born of the pain
that shrieks like lightning in the mouth of the abyss,
a torn animal
peeled out of its own skin like an eye
to add its darkness to the furnace of the black rose
that roars in the night
to blood the hungry mirror
with the thorns and talons of clarity,
to feed the wound of its existence
its existence.
And when I walk to the end of myself
through the golden rod and waist-high asters,
the seed of the stars that sleep with the daughters of men,
some of the flowers close up like fists and kisses
and others grasp themselves like a key
to a door that the whole universe can walk through,
and there are strange birds
flying from the eyes
in the rising skull of the moon
that sing like the pyres of cremated guitars
that died like trees in their solitude
and even the gates are weeping like wild dogs.
And there's a wind, intelligent, dark
the ghost of an ancient serpent
horned without ears,
an ocean of mind that exceeds itself like a wave
that howls like a secret it can't tell itself,
like a root blind to its own flowers,
that wants to lead my voice away in chains,
that wants my tongue to try
like a leaf in the updraft of a fire storm
to scream its agony out in the night
so that even the furthest star shudders
with the horror of its final liberation
like an arrow through the throat of a caged hawk.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
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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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There's A Black Lotus In My Heart

There's a black lotus in my heart, black hole
of enlightenment, black waterstar, sacred eclipse.
Nothing worth attaining that isn't unattainable.
And all the gates are upside down and backwards.
Albino starmaps with black dots shining
on the other side of the mirror, zodiacs
of black matter looping back on themselves
like solar auroras of the sun that rises at midnight.
I don't know what all this means. I may have gone
too far into exile and actually managed to get
to the dark side of the moon. Or I'm a warehouse
of shadows at noon that have lost track of the time
like blind sundials that feel they're being followed.

The light illuminates, but I bloom nocturnally.
I've got the burn marks of stars all over my skin.
I work on the nightshift at the foundry of a constellation
busy pouring itself out like iron and oxygen, blood and air,
forged out the afterlives of hydrogen I've gathered over the years.
A fire-womb engendering one you fill with water.
Fire the midwife of its own daughter. I'm envious
of creative immolations I know I'll never attain.
Though my left brain is in full communication with the right
and I'm a full moon of the bright vacancy, dark abundance
of both sides, and the harvest is ripe, I'm always
a star ahead of my light, so I don't end up
like a dead school furnace in the basement
writing my memoirs like a manuscript of ashes in an urn.

Deconstruct me wholly down to my last atom
and I promise you, if that's all I've got to work with
like one stem cell to another at the beginning
of a matrix of causes and conditions into which
we'll be placed by a Hox gene assessing the chi
of which direction our eyes should face, and how many
degrees of separation there should be between our ears,
I promise you, I'll still burn with the fireflies
and the supernovas like a blind prophet
who saw two wavelengths copulating like snakes
and has been tied at this stake of of a spine,
an oracular heretic of both sexes in synchrony
like the hybrid of a phoenix and a waterbird
burning in visionary serpent fire ever since
for the sake of a muse that always comes
in the nick of time like rain on the moon to my rescue.

When it's night in the diamond of my third eye
is the light not more mystically enhanced by the darkness,
more mystically specific than the white wash of the sun?
The moon is the mitochondrian that tempers
the toxicity of the light so the nucleus of the solar system
can blaze with alien oxygen meteorically across the night.
The black mirror, brighter than the white,
shows you your reflection on the inside
where you're arrayed like a faceless world
that's given up trying to second guess
who's the unerring witness under the lifemask
of the surreal cosmology that doesn't recognize
it's not a self, at first glance, and that all physics
is the psychology of ridding yourself of the delusion
you can, even if you're riding a flying carpet
out into this desert of stars to sweep the constellations away
like mirages that have been throwing bad meat
down your holy wells like sacred crocodiles.

Ignite even so much as a matchbook at this distance
or turn on a flashlight to see what's in the dark
as if you were looking for your mind with your mind on the light
even though it's as abundantly clear as your eyes it's night out,
and the billions of stars in the next closest galaxy,
Messier 31, at eleven o'clock above the middle star
in Andromeda on the rocks, and two million light years
of enlightenment will gently recede back into the cosmic hiss
and disappear from your field of view subliminally
knowing, because the timing's yours, you're a daylily
covering your insight with the petals of your own hands
because you don't know how to open them sidereally yet
from the outside in, where your darkness shines
and the night you turn your face away from
like the bright side of the moon blinds you
by a reflected glory to the radiance of the origins
of your own vision, deep within, where it all begins
emanating stars of the darkness of your own eyes.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Who Taught You

Who taught you to abhor the savage
within you
as if you were
an intolerant missionary to yourself?
Or walk into the room
and sit down
like a civilization that can't compose itself?

And what strange habits you have for eyes
like ominous seabirds off the coast
of the continent with nowhere to perch
you've just discovered about yourself
that doesn't bear your name.

And o come on now
isn't it the most grievously wounded
who cry out the loudest
in their delirium of pain
and shake their wills
like steel at the ruthless heavens
though all they've ever really done is heal?

And why slash out in your anger
like the moon at everyone
when you should know by now
better than anyone
that whenever you do
it's the sword that bleeds to death?

And you say you've tried to live decently
in an indecent world
but it's a shame
you've never walked barefoot anywhere
without your morals in your hand like shoes.

That's just the mud and water of it
between your fingers and your toes
but I've never joined a Buddha
eating flowers for lunch
who would have it any other way.

Or as Solomon said to so and so,
on his way to the temple
to set an example,
half a baby isn't the same as a whole bunch.
And then broke down in tears.

We all have our fears and illusions
but isn't so much suffering in the world
generated by the fact
we cherish our misery
like self-inflicted voodoo dolls
we won't let go of
because nothing else
looks like us into the void
and sees nothing that looks like us
looking back with stars in their eyes?

But what a surprise to be here at all
stepping in and out
of these coffins and lifeboats
paired like shoes under our beds
where they gape
like mouths before the open sea
that has washed them ashore
like dust out of its one good eye
we just flew into
like birds against a windowpane.

And even more of a wonder
is the day you discover
you can taste the full harvest
in every crumb of a dream
and even in the lamp
that's gone out in the night
clarity is still faster than light.

Within you I swear
on all that is human
are worlds within worlds
like the spherical mirrors of the morning
hanging their eyes like jewels
in the webs of the dreamcatchers
that looked everywhere
through the spiritual lost and founds of the light
but couldn't find us until nightfall
when we each came out like a star
above our own manger
and the darkness was sweet with gifts.

The blind don't diminish
the brightness of the mirror
when they hold themselves
up to it like a shadow
and even when your eyes are open
you don't add a feather of light to the shining
though you burn like Icarus without a starmap
by flying too near the sun
beyond the heels of your aspiration.

And even when we are crazed moths
in a straitjackets of flesh
seeking asylum in the fire,
isn't it the Promethean nature
of every living creature
that has ever stolen from the gods
even in a state of ashes
not to be bound for long by anything
that isn't out of reach?

It's not the art of a petty life
to know how to long
for the impossible for years
without disappointment
knowing that if appearances
can be deceptive
then so must be the illusion
when anything disappears.

The important thing is not
to try to attain anything
by reaching out
a finger shy of God
for things like life and love and light
as if you were a dead battery
asking the stars for a jumpstart
when one of the myriad truths
of the dark matter at hand is
you don't have to work hard
to earn your own gifts
like a beggar in a palace
that doesn't recognize her own face
looking down upon her
like her own reflection in the heavens,
as if her eyes always had to go
in the same place either side of her nose
and couldn't flow along
with the shoreless starstreams
like easy fish dopaddling through space.

And if you must cry out
like an insatiable mirror
for things you've lost
or pine at the gate
of your own homelessness
like a long sad farewell
to all those things that never came
like the sea to your feet
as if every wave
were meant to fit you
like a glass slipper,

then I suggest
with only a whisper
of night in my voice
to tempt the light out of hiding
that the next time you cry
like a wounded sword
that no longer divides
the empty grotto of the pain
that separates lovers
like two halves of the same brain,

look up at the nightsky
as if you were looking into the eyes
of your own prophetic tears
and see and be more deeply
than any kind of telescope
or wishing well
in every single one of them
the dark pregnant mother
of the billion chandeliers
that hang like stars above you.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Deeper Than Stars

Something deeper than tears to weep for you.
I weep blood. I weep the silence
on the backstairs with the screen door
that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping
all through the night at the slightest gust of wind
as if a constellation were trying
to strike up a insightful conversation
with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.
I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.
I need to dance the pain away
in a sword dance of serpents
that know how to carry a tune
like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,
straight to the heart of the mysterious apple
that's sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.
No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows
returning to the budding tree in spring,
no green leaf of an innocent tongue,
not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn
writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,
not even among ghosts, can find a voice
that isn't already the dead language
of an absence that can't be adorned
by a seance of words.
I light no candles. I summon no gods.
No pretence of knowing where you've gone.
No black hole that's as empty as
your ring on the table, no halo
that ever fell as far from heaven.
Good-bye's too optimistic and farewell's
the rudder of a grave on the rocks.
And if I were to raise the paper sail
of another poem like the waxing phase
of the funereal moonboat
that carried you away,
I'd make it black. I'd raise it
like the shroud of a black magician
that can make things disappear,
like an eclipse at half mast
and patch it with the skull and crossbones
of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.
I wouldn't return your personal belongings
back to the morning like starlings and doves.
But there aren't enough sacred syllables
swimming like moonlit fish
in the watershed of the silence
to open this fountainmouth of grief
like an aviary of flightless birds.
Nor would I risk having you remember me,
and turn around like a false start,
supposing you can still recall anything at all,
like a light you left on in the hall
the night you left home for good.
You were magic while you were here to work it.
You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.
You were the black mass of the sun at midnight
and the blood sister of the moon
that nicked your finger
on both her crescent thorns at once
so one was the cure to the other's wound
like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.
Given how close to the moon you were
it didn't come as a surprise
when you started writing me loveletters
inscribed in bone as if you'd just invented
a whole new language out of your claws
to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon
didn't lay its silver sword down between us
to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.
And it wasn't long before the elixir began to work
and I lost count of the number
of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,
similitudes for the night skies
that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars
that revelled in the crazy wisdom
of their mystically inspired atmospheres.
As just as beautiful as they were,
so were they irresistibly dangerous.
How many light years now
have I poured this memory of them
like a love potion over my roots
and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream
like stars and blossoms streaming
through the heartwood of an ageing tree
that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,
and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,
knew you weren't coming anymore,
and the night bird had no one to sing for?
But, hey, I'm still a better seance
than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me
calling the faithful to prayer
in all directions at once like a paper airplane
the boy in me has sent out to search for you
like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,
dripping with clusters of blood
the size of hemorrhaging grapes,
fireflies caught in a spider-web
of starless constellations that aren't a sign
of anything except I miss you worst at night.
If you could sense the tremor
in even the slightest wavelength of light
I'm trying to shine on the darkness to find you,
I'd write you a holy book of sacred silence
inspired by the shadows in my blood
that overtake me like strangers from behind
with an urgent message not to return home
to what isn't there anymore.
I'd sit out here all night by myself
beside the black waters of this night creek
unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,
that's been talking to itself
as it walks in its sleep on the water,
and I would beseech the stars with my eyes
to let me know if they've seen you,
and in my heart I would entreat them
with the solo of a wounded wolf
raising its head up in a wild prayer
to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,
to give me a starmap to when and where
I can see you face to face again
and touch your eyelids in your sleep
like crocuses coming up through the snow.
Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm
that scattered us to winds like all these poems
I've tried to write for you ever since
as if you were still somewhere nearby
like another pair of eyes
in my pain and my solitude
watching from the woods
the stars, the water, the moon,
under the stones in the river
that mark your grave and name
above the flowing of this endless epitaph
of leaves and blossoms and poems
as if you alone could still read them,
like the comings and goings,
of waterbirds on the moon,
the first draft of words on the wind,
maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,
and still understand what I was trying to mean.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Sit At My Window

I sit at my window
trying to translate the Kufic script
of the shadows of the trees on the snow,
smoking the invisible ink of the light
over the flame of my mind
to clarify my seeing
by realizing there is no deep or shallow
in the fathomless depths of I am,
nothing hidden, nothing revealed.

And it's not so much that I am in the presence of the world,
but that the presence, the world, is me,
and if I go looking for it,
only my fingerprints will be found
like these violet shadows dusted by the snow
under my multitudinous mugshot in the mirror.

So I open my mind and my eye, my heart and my hand
and let things arise as they will,
knowing that even this is a blunder
that advances my tardy illumination by another eclipse.

This morning blue is the taste of the sky
and I am alive again at my desk
to wonder who or what or why I might be
this wondering spontaneity
circling like a bird in the abyss,
feathered by feeling and thought
for a tree or a meaning to perch in
that hasn't already been struck
by the lightning of my homeless insight.

Indwelling energy in the turmoil of a terrible silence,
I am an ambassador of water to an unknown star
that foils my blood with light the closer I approach
and I don't know what the message is
or who it's from, but every time I deliver it,
my head comes off like the moon.

At some point you have to give up looking
to go on seeing, you must
come to a full stop
if you want to liberate the pen
that indicts you like an assassin
with his ear to the wall.

So I go by night, unheeded and alone,
a constellation of my own
that doesn't read the braille of itself
reflected like direction in the starchart on the lake,
cored like eyes into the dice of my bones,
or mummified by a legend in a straitjacket
interred in the long-standing consensus of a guess,
knowing I would only be following my own footprints
like the shadows of these words
that flow from the trees in the snow.

And there are squirrels that leap from branch to branch
of these arboreal letters like commas
that don't know where they go
and wrens that perch like quotation marks
around things that can never be said
that everyone claims they know
as they call out their name
like the echoless vocabulary
of a febrile grammar in a mad dream
as if their whole life were ingathered into one last scream
that might shatter the mirror of the way things inevitably seem.

I listen to the world and hear in each person and form
the mindstream moving through the night
like the voice of a mystic alphabet
returning to the sea
with news of itself
whispered into its own ear.

And if sometimes the stars think
my seeing goes too far,
my seeking exceeds the bounds of the light,
as it turns planets like doorknobs
to open new rooms in a dark mansion
that stands like an abandoned cornerstone of the night on a hill
waiting for me to return like a lost threshold,
or the faceless side of the moon to a window,
then let me here and now confess to my own denial
and knock on the door of the next false address
to see if I can find who wrote
this loveletter that slashes me open like a smile
and reads me out loud to the stars on the wind
as if I were the last flare from an empty lifeboat.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I'm Flying Under The Light

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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Blood Bound

Countdown, descending down to zero
Bursting into flames
Can't you see the coming of a hero
On this enchanting day
So stand up and be counted
In the solar glance in the desert sand
No longer the hunted
United we are 'til the day we fall
A chain unbreakable
Every link is allied to our mighty vow
We're Blood Bound - We aim for the sun
The luminous moon will take us high over ground
We're Blood Bound - Collecting the stars
We hold a power that is greater than all
We're Blood Bound
Watch out, the heathen's all around us
Always watch you back
We've got a lust for freedom
Whatever they say we know we'll stay
We are indestructible
And no matter what happens we will rise above
We're Blood Bound - We aim for the sun
The luminous moon will take us high over ground
We're Blood Bound - Collecting the stars
We hold a power that is greater than all
We're Blood Bound
Look into my eyes
Tell me what is hidden deep inside
Chains about to break
It's the everlasting freedom for us all
We're Blood Bound - We aim for the sun
The luminous moon will take us high over ground
We're Blood Bound - Collecting the stars
We hold a power together
We're Blood Bound - We aim for the sun
The luminous moon will take us high over ground
We're Blood Bound - Collecting the stars
We hold a power together - Blood Bound
Power forever - Blood Bound
Power - We're Blood Bound

song performed by by Hammerfall
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I Did The Kind Of Good A Storm Does

I did the kind of good a storm does.
I may have broken some tree limbs
and downed some powerlines along the way
but I cleared the air of its festering
and from top to bottom
we got down to the roots of things
like lightning and rain
like real radicals
free-basing the ideological ions
addicted to their brains
like razorblades.
O ya
I remember now
we were going to save the world from itself.
I gave up trying
when I realized
that if we did that
there would be no one left
to save the world from us.
Trying to justify yourself in retrospect
is like trying to exonerate a big hairdo
you wore back in the early seventies.
It can't be done
except as a kind of dangerous chess
you play with yourself
and cheat.
It's fun to play
with the lethal intensities
and swaggering immensities of yesterday
as if all those great sublimities that moved us
like fixed stars
had come down to earth
like the ashs of fireflies
in a snakepit of thought
poured out of tiny urns
the size of a human heart.
When I've got nothing else to do
and the moon bores me late at night with its looking
I run my tongue along the edge of your words
like old knives
I've kept like a collection of my favourite smiles
to see if they still know how to draw blood
and what that might still mean to my heart.
Maybe I should have fallen on them like swords
as you wanted me to
instead of reading them
like a delinquent boy
in front of a no trespassing sign.
Back in those days
my heart was a rock
and my mind
was a broken windowpane.
But I'm not one of those people
who long for the past
as if you could step into the same river twice.
Everyone forgets
memory
Mnemosyne
is the mother of the muses.
Everyday the past
comes up with a new song
that surpasses the last like the future.
The ghost of tomorrow returns to its grave at dawn.
The past is just as spontaneously inspired
as the present
and makes it up as it goes along
thinking this is what it must be like
to live on and on and on
with your cosmic elbows
leaning on earthly windowsills
wondering what it might be like to die
and come back
reincarnated as a horizon
or a threshold.
But I don't go back to the past
for the view
like a tourist passing through
his old neighbourhood
to see where he was born and died.
I don't want a brass plague
for a birth certificate
and a postcard
from the edge of nowhere
for a passport
that lies about my record
for telling
what I mistake for the truth
to anyone who'll listen.
I don't want to fake my way into reality
the way they do in Zen.
I don't want to begin again
like tomorrow's has-been.
I'm not trying to convert the faithless
to my disbelief
like a tree preaching to a leaf
like a cross to a crucifixion.
I'm not trying to pump my latest work of fiction
up into a universally inflatable religion
you can take on camping trips to the holy land.
I'm not sure
I'm even really trying to understand
the way things were way back then
when we didn't need to.
Just something to do
when I'm watching the moon
float downstream
like the prophetic skull of Orpheus
all the way from Thrace to Mytilene in Lesbos.
If I look at it long enough
even through a dirty window
I can see a footloose waterlily
preening its feathers
like the swan of a loveletter
late in the autumn
to someone
who will pick it up out of the water
and wonder who it's from
for the rest of their life
like I do
remembering you
as you are to me
now that all these lunar calendars
have shed their blossoms and leaves
and stand naked as the tree of knowledge
adding zeros to everything
like tree-rings in the heartwood
of my personal history.
I've never made a cliche
out of any muse of mine
whether she took me to bed or not.
If she infused me with inspiration
I didn't abuse her
with a parting shot
like the afterthought
of an ignoble mind
or a paper phoenix
that couldn't take the heat
when things got sweet and hot.
I come back
like an old wind to a funeral pyre
that blazed its way up to the stars
to see if anything
was left unburnt or unanswered
in the ashes of the scorched earth.
I rock the cradle awhile
like a manger in hell
that once gave birth
to a childless messiah.
I transcend my own innocence
and fall toward paradise
without asking to be forgiven.
Love hangs stars above us all
that take the fall
for the way our scars
demonize our open wounds for living.
I drink from my skull
to your memory
and then I drink to you
whoever you are now.
In a desert on the moon
in a sea of shadows
I drink in the darkness alone
like an open window
to let the birds out
as if they were the only words
I had left to say
about the passing years
to hide my crazy tears
like an atheist on a grailquest
who knows that life
is a mirage
of burning muse water
that tastes like broken mirrors.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Serpent

The serpent sits enthroned
at the top of its own stairwell,
helically reposing in its own empyrean
like an August hawk
coiling up its own thermals;
its fangs, a stargate
to an unknown afterlife, emancipation,
and the jewel of its head,
the first stone thrown,
a small planet without
the eyelid of a sky,
a nugget of mystic uranium,
looped in a turban of orbits,
a sacred arrowhead
that flys from itself like a bow
drawn back long before the wind
knew its first feather.
Lethal healer,
the sword that kills is the sword that saves.

This morning,
the drubbing of the rain on a tin roof,
the hiss of traffic
flaring like matches down the sleek asphalt,
if I were to say
I want the emotional life of space,
I don't know if I'd mean it,
but I'm so weary
of being this slow crisis of a bird
mesmerized by the swaying eyes
of the black lightning
that has caught me in the net
it weaves of my own nerves,
I want to douse my heart
in the next providential tide of tears
like a torch I put out in the night
to see better in the dark.

I asked for wings
and my spine was adorned with fire.
I asked for water
and I'm a fish on the wind.
and now this desert I hoped to remain,
a craze of sand,
has grown teeth
and is overgrazing the starfields like pyramids.

I don't think
I will ever recover
from the wound I received
like the hidden twin of the moon,
trying to love the world, myself, women, people.
Every word was a road, a pulse, an eye,
a dropp of blood
I could ride to the end of and beyond
into the implacable subtlety
of my own empty, ageless temples
where even the silence isn't ghost enough
to conjure a medium
to jar the table as a sign,
and death is buried in its own vacuity
like an embryo in a mask without eyes.

I was bound by my own boundlessness,
my nerves, wicks in the abyss
that enhanced the darkness
by cleaving me like a tree
vision after vision,
another world
with every blink of the eye
that wiped the mirror clean of me like an ax
until I understood
that even the most enlightened watersheds of wisdom
are just a smear of perception
on the least dropp of that splendor
I went looking for like a cloud
saturated with the ancient seas of the moon
that was covered by my own looking.

I lay at the bottom
of my oceanic odyssey,
trying not to sink,
but I wanted to give something back
for what I felt I had received;
not an ethic or a metaphysic,
but a spontaneous action of the blood
that remembers it was once a rose.
I wanted to return spring like a water-key to the moon;
I wanted to harvest the shadows
of my own non-existence
and break bread
with the famine of ghosts
that came like royalty to beg food from their servant,
blind doors standing on the thresholds of awareness
asking me to address myself
to the terrible openness
of their unanswerable need.

I have eaten my own ashes
in the furnace of every star
I have ever looked upon.
I have drowned in the wells
of the faceless, fathomless mirrors,
and every woman I have ever drunk from
was a grail with an enigmatic black pearl in it
lustrous as the moon in eclipse.

O promises of bliss
that tuned the webs of the spiders
like a guitarist with perfect pitch
to the frequency of my spinal cord
that I might entangle a star
in the silk of my conceiving;
that I might seize a firefly
in the fangs of my thought
and taste the honey of the lantern
that lit my dark corner
in the era of the moment.

O sweetest of lies to ripen with longing
like the eyes of a child in the darkness
far from home.
I was trying to find a road
that fit my walking like shoes on a mountain;
I was trying to walk on water with mystic crutches;
I was looking for an arrow
dipped in the blood of a serpent with wings,
set aflame by a demonic star
and feathered by spiritual fire
to restring me like a bow
severed like the branch of a sacred grove
by the oracular blade of the moon.

I was too deeply sheathed in the truth
to appreciate the arcane sagacity of my lies.
I stood like a shadow in the burning doorway of my own fire
and looked deeply into the night
to answer my own knocking
like the echo of a stranger in the darkness,
walking away from someone who didn't know
how to greet himself.

I was a tree crucified on a man,
a vandal in the shrine of the moment,
bleeding like stained-glass,
a rosary of vertebrae and skulls
reconstructed in the future museum of now
I played myself into like a funeral plan.

Now everywhere the wind is a pilgrim,
I leave my heart like a shrine
I will never return to.
And the sadness, and the solitude
and the vastness of my insignificance
is the shadow of a bird on a cloud.
The only way to perfect my defeat
was to sit at the feet of my most cherished delusion
like a rootless flower watching over a coffin,
then rise like the wind
from the rubbish of the shedding,
the loneliest pillar and sole cornerstone of the sky.

Now my apish profundities
no longer crack fleas of light like stars
I picked out of God's burning beard
with the forceps of the moon.
Now I am infested with constellations.
I no longer turn the pages of the waterlilies
like the holy books of an inspired swamp.
I no longer seep down to the river
to drink from the moon
like a serpent at the water's edge
and watch the panicked angels jumping
from the reflection of an uncrossed bridge
that collapsed like a covenant with hell.
I no longer shred my heart
like a secret document
in an abandoned embassy of swans
looking for asylum further south,
tormented by the unattainability
of a woman's beauty,
looking for sanctuary
in the ashes of a black sail
that flared like a poppy with passion
at every gust of desire
that silvered the trembling grass
with sidereal aspirations.

Why bother to laminate your lovers, your legends?
Let them go like autumn leaves and smoke,
the last breath you took
before you were interred
like a scream in the larynx of a deaf-mute,
a foreign currency you couldn't spend at home.
Naked is the only way to dress for the rain,
but it doesn't matter which
from the wardrobe of all your many lies
you wear to the fire that waits for you
like a fledgling waits for its plumage.

And this is a long river
and this is a long day and a night
and maybe only the silence is listening
to what the stars are preaching
from the pulpits of the flowers,
and this that says me now
is just the promo for the intensive care ward
of a new religion
the founders are always the first to betray;
but when I truly let go
it was my falling
that taught me to patch my shoes with the sky.

And have you come this far,
passed through this many gates
for wisdom, compassion, freedom,
wandered aimlessly until you could not tell
the stars from the sand,
the journey from the arrival,
suffered worse than all the things you cannot say
until you forgot what you were looking for
in the first place, until
you despised what you craved the most?

I don't remember how long I slept
before my dreaming woke me up
and I realized
no fool could defame my solitude
and that life
was only the story of a scar
looking for the knife that inflicted it
like a shadow
in the forsaken valleys
of the mountains of the moon.

Looking for a pearl of light
I had to plunge into a darkness
deeper than anything
my eyes had ever given birth to before.
I had to swallow the key before I could open the door.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Something Said Softly

Something said softly in the night
like a tendril on a windowsill
tasting the moon, a whisper, a word
that walked in the light without
abandoning its shadow,
a phrase with wet wings
dreaming itself out of its chrysalis
not knowing whether it's a leaf or a dragonfly
until the whole tree wakes up beside it,
something sought but rarely said
saturated with the meaningless life of meaning
that could touch space like flesh
and make it feel the thrill of new eyes
running down its arm like tears.
And it's not that I want
to unsay the night or God
to define myself as a human,
and it's of little moment to me,
seed on the wind,
what worlds are born of my words,
what ends, what begins,
what comes of what I cannot say,
but I want to say something
with the savour of time in it
that's worth living for a little more each day
like a small tree rooted like a thought
in a crevasse of eternity,
greening the moon.
Late at night, in the darkness,
while the silence is off preserving something,
and all I can hear is your breath
off in the distance like an ocean,
I want to unpack my vagrant heart
like a patched guitar-case,
a grave-robber in a pyramid,
and attune my afterlife
to the key of this one
in such a way
I can play like a new star in Orion
to all the sad, beautiful fireflies of the moment
that hover over us like living constellations of our own
not bound to any paradigm of light
that can only be touched by a mountain of stone.
I want to paint something
that feels like the flower
that just brushed against your hand,
I want to be inspired by the mystic blue of midnight
like window glass fired in the kiln of a star
that has looked upon the suffering of humans for so long,
their atrocities and deprivations,
their terrors and wrecked joys,
compassion has turned it into an eye so clear
you can sip water from it like tears
that taste of the history of blood and wine
that danced alone like a vine at its own wedding
with a bride of rain that unveiled herself
like falling chandeliers.
Unfailingly, absurdly, obsessively human
in the shadow of thundering magnitudes
that feel like the extinctions of gods
that time has wheeled out
to the enormity of the gravepit
that limes every abyss of the heart
with the stars of a new universe,
I want to add one candle to the shining
in a folly of insight so illuminating
even the earliest galaxies
forever entering the darkness
on the threshold of their first shedding
could see it, something
so profoundly vernal and intimate
even I can believe in it.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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O This Morning More Than Ever

O this morning more than ever
I want to disappear into my life
like a bird into the blue oblivion
of a migration of one
that's never coming back.
Things aren't solid.
They're real.
And tonight I will appeal again
to the subtle intelligence of the dark matter
that resonates throughout space
like energy musing upon itself at rest
after long labour
to let me evaporate with the stars
like a breath somebody took
deeply into themselves
and then breathed out.
Did my eyes sweeten the windows
they looked through like women?
Did my looking help ripen the stars?
Strange wounds.
Stranger scars.
There's no end
to the myriad afterlives of water
that a human lives through
like the weather
of an undiscovered sea
and time just keeps
carrying things forth into the carrying forth
like a clepshydra of severed heads
bleeding like buckets
one into another.
An alphabet of prophetic skulls
that never finish a sentence
because the things we say
already have more in common
with the dead
than they do with the living
from the very first word
that falls from our mouths like an apple.
If I have spoken in tongues and symbols
and mixed occult elixirs
like secret constellations
to heal the injured night
my voice never forgot
that it was a mere gesture of moonlight,
a mystic adagio of picture-music
dancing alone in its own shadows.
And if I went crazy in the pursuit
of an earthly excellence
it was just to pass the time.
Anyone with a spirit needs a cosmic hobby.
Anyone with a mind
needs to let go now and then
like a universe that expresses itself completely
and then stands a human up
like a finger to the lips of a prolonged silence.
And what can you say
to those with a heart
that wait for blood to return
like the wind to their sails
with good news
like oxygen from Atlantis
that things are beginning to look up
except drink up
until you're sober as dry land again.
The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator
at the equinoctial colure
and it's spring again
in the northern hemisphere
where the crocuses
are poking their noses
through holes in the snow
like bruises beginning to bloom.
If there is no wonder in your love
you will never know
the profound delight
of being grateful for your life
and the stars won't humble you
when you ask the night who you are
into knowing what they do.
Stop listening to everything with your mouth
and sit down beside the fountain
like a road or a sundial
that's found its way back
and hear what your ears
have been saying for years
about the coin you lost in the mindstream
like your passage across the river of death
coming up like the moon
over your left shoulder
to take your breath away.
Wisdom renounces the wise
and therein lies enlightenment.
Ignorance embraces the fools of the spirit
and there are no words for it.
The best is clarity.
Clarity is all.
This is a doorway.
This is a wall.
And this is all the gold of India
I would give if I could
to sit down with Hafiz
by the banks of the Ruknabad
among all those Persian roses
and steal musical riffs from the stream
to say what we impossibly mean
to the young slave girl
with the mole on her cheek
who's learning to speak our language like a muse.
If I have longed for things all my life
as if they were out of reach
it was one of the dark jewels of my childhood
the died like an eye for a lack of light
that taught me
longing is more creative
than fulfillment
and the nightbird
on its broken branch alone
sings like a wine closer to home
than all the daylight choirs
of happier wings in the vineyard
that inspires the liars into blossoming
like loveletters on the wind
they don't know where to send.
So I tell them without believing
they know what I'm talking about
to take a page out of the orchard's book like I do
and when spring's in the air
send them everywhere.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Scouring The Patina Of Time Off With Stars

Scouring the patina of time off with stars
the way I used to grind pyrex plates
with varying grades of carborundum
down into telescopic mirrors, then silver them
with a vapour of aluminum to add
to the luster of their parabolic eyes.
Been looking into the darkness so long
I'm beginning to shine on my own.
Now from moment to moment
there's as much darkness coming out of the light
as there are black holes sand-blasting
the hour-glass shape of this bubble of the multiverse
with firestorms of desert stars as I make my way
from one oasis to the next where the mirages
wander in out of the night to drink
from the reflections of their own faces
with hands cupped like the hulls of leaking lifeboats.

I don't believe a life of delusion is any less painful
than a life of enlightenment, even if
your scarecrow self is finally standing naked
under a full moon that's come to realize
that an orbit isn't the same as an enlightenment path
that can loop back on itself like a snake or a shoelace
or the retrograde motion of Mars, without
wandering off the road you were meant to walk
because that's the way you went. Give them both
sixteen ounce gloves and let reality
have it out with delusion in eternity
like two siblings of the same dark mother
trying to get some rest from the racket
after giving up on interceding
by putting some distance between them
light years out of earshot of the nightbirds
that have been longing for her return ever since.

Even the first bliss of the blossoming of illumination
grows sad if it's not wholly shared like an orchard
with everyone as the wind turns around like a fist
flowering into a more open-handed approach to life.
Enlightenment is in everyone like a wavelength
is in a particle when no one is watching.
And if today you're an angel in a coma of ice
tomorrow the diamonds will fall out of your dark halo
and slowly thaw you out as you get closer to the light
like a comet plunging into the sun like the vapour
of a bridal veil you've finally shed like a snakeskin
that had to come off like the white-out of the eclipse
you were living, to see the stars that were rooted
in the darkness within emerging out of your own starmud
like waterlilies and larkspur and the peony buds
of the remote observatories on cold mountaintops
breaking into life like planets at a suggestion from the ants.

Stations of our perishing, perhaps. Phases of the moon
topping my skull up again like the cup that she drinks from
with the crazy wisdom of the lunatic she takes for a companion.
First crescent after the crone. Death's door left ajar
to let a little of the light out for those of us
who like to walk down long country roads alone at night
brindled by shadows, runged by black flames
like ladders of prophetic fire with nothing left to lean on
but the event horizons of their own imaginations
exploring the inevitable exits and entrances
of the passage of life like a waterclock of stars
descending the dark stairwells of the night with the maple keys
to the secret cellars where they age the best wine
by letting it stare into the dark so long
it begins to shine like a blind dream with a light of its own.

poem by Patrick White
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The Wizard of Clayton Close

He's steeped in the shadows of ivy and stone,
And time is the seed that the Wizard has sown,
Has sown for the magick of weaving the night
In a tapestry taken from burning delight.
Burning delight in the eyes of the mind he has
Stolen, to conjure insight for the blind, for the
Blind are the pebbles that litter his beach, while the
Tides of his mind set the blind out of reach.

The masonry wall is caught deep in the spell that he
Conjured forgotten, in some distant dell,
And if you should peer through the ivy and stone
There's a voice whispers... 'leave me, just leave me alone.
I've wandered with Ishtar, away from your eyes
From your spying and prying, away from your lies,
In the peril and terror that lonely men speak...
Seek not the undying, whatever you seek.'

But drawn to the shadows and drawn to the stone
I could leave him not ever, not leave him alone,
And turning one day to the light and the lace
He uncovered his forehead, uncovered his face.
I froze in the instant to question my mind for
The face spoke eternities, infinite time
And the stars held their place in the lips of the man
And the cheeks and the ears, and the eyes and the hand.

The wall crumbled inward as slowly I fell
Through his eyes to the stars, to the depths of his well,
And knowledge was mine as it never had been,
In my mind, misaligned, in the things that I'd seen.
But knowledge was danger, disaster and death
To the heart that would beat, to the mind, to the breath,
To the cheek of a girl or the smile of a man,
To the whisp' of the wind, to the shift of the sand.

And nothing exists in the nothing of me
But the stars and the sky, and the sand and the sea,
The light that was night and the dark of the day
As I drift in the tides of his vision away.
And look as I might for the eyes of his mind
I believe that the Wizard is totally blind,
That once in the depths of his well and his breath
We're imprisoned in freedom, the freedom from death.

If only the way was as clearly defined
In the world of the deaf and the dumb and the blind,
I'd crawl through the stars to the lids of his eyes
To the breadth of his world and the width of his lies.
For the comfort of woman and warmth of a man
I would give all the shift and the sift of the sand,
And not all the shadows of ivy and stone
Would lure me to walk in the winter alone.

21 May 1975

poem by David Lewis Paget
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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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