Who Looks For The Sea By Following Its Waves?
Who looks for the sea by following its waves?
Or the sky by following the flights of birds?
Or their mind with their mind?
Who looks for seeing with their eyes?
Dogen Zenji: The place is here. The path leads everywhere.
And that should be the inexhaustible end of it. Freedom.
And all along the river that means
whatever I want it to, my unfinished solitude.
This discrete spiritual protocol between myself and the stars
that don't know how many times they've saved my life
by simply being there to gaze upon, as if in some way
they were so much more cleansing than water
and I could bathe in them to wash off the dust of the world
on any clear night, or, sometimes when you cry
it's the light that pours out, not your tears.
Some memories enter a coma and stay there,
giving you the impression that the past is fixed,
but I know the past is as creatively ongoing as now
and what was isn't the fossilized substance of what is,
by the way it can still sting, bite, caress and grow
into the available dimension of the future,
by how few times I've come here in joy
that wasn't mentored by some diffuse sorrow
that lingered over the lake like a wraith of the drifting mist
that had drowned in it barely an afterlife or two ago.
Always in the background of my heart I feel
this compassionate sadness like the cosmic hiss of creation,
and o how the watersheds of understanding long to be fountains
and exfoliate into flowing diamonds that simply
celebrate the scintillance, without embracing everything
in the mournful tenderness of this space it shares with them
as if in everything I'm aware of, I were always
mourning the passage of flowers. And if not that,
the heretical indignation born of what it appears
we must suffer to be here, without knowing why,
though I struggle most times to suppress that
to make sure the door stays open to any strays
that might wander in like wayward oversights of creative clarity.
There's a sophomoric debate still going on
about whether I'm getting older or not, but alone,
I can feel the weight of this seasoned bell within me
and I ask myself is this the heaviness of the ripening pear
as it bends the branch as well as the light toward earth?
Is that why time approaches me like the night coming on
sweetened with stars, in this second innocence of wonder
before I fall again? Is pain the only intermediary
between our death and our birth and detachment and separation
the only kind of truce or bridge or oxymoron
that could reconcile them even remotely?
So often when I can't see the radiance of the world
I think it's because my eyes are unclean,
that it's my error of perception if the arrow misses the mark,
not any inherent injustice in the way things are,
because who am I to say how it should all be experienced
when I could talk forever without ever knowing
what a thought, an emotion, or a word truly is,
let alone life with all its conditioned chaos
and dissonant harmonies? All these travelling companions
on the same road I am, trying to figure out
whether they're refugees on the run,
or pilgrims without a shrine. And I'm modestly
exalted by my humility when I think like this
until I remember how easy it is to go blind
looking into any source of illumination
watching two serpents copulating like wavelengths
and helical chromosomes. And I turn away
to stay true to the face in the mirror that isn't mine.
I plunge into a black hole, a rite of passage,
and when I come out the other end, even my shadows shine.
poem by Patrick White
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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
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Totally Lost
I
With someone new to adore,
you are constantly
haunting me
as if at times you can penetrate through death
but sometimes I know that I am fabricating it
and for years you are out of my life
but sometimes I cannot get you out of my thoughts
before you jump into my heart again
as if you are not peaceful
on the other side
and in my sorrow and in life's coldness
I am stranded here
and you find no kind of relief
in the late night's big silence.
II
In the late night's big silence
my thoughts are at times with you,
while the big separation brings a chill
while I keep clinging to memories.
You are much too far from me
and your whole humanity
cannot stay here,
and it appears at times when I read your old letters,
when you are like a flower to me
that could grow in the earth of my soul
but death has divided us
and untimely you were pruned away in your prime
and still your absence cuts through me like a raw cry,
sometimes it's much better not to know about you.
III
Sometimes it's much better not to know about you,
to totally wipe out that which was between us
to forget the memories and passion
as if nothing had been
to cause your presence to eternally fade away,
to let each memory slowly pine away,
to stop me from daring in my dreams
to search for you to appear
and I am in a world where yours are divided from mine,
where I have got to keep to the here and now,
where I have to know that we are in separate places
and I am aware of this reality
that destiny cruelly rips lives apart with her claws;
my whole world was where you went
IV
My whole world was where you went
and in you I found my rest and joy
while you were with me as my darling
but life had devoured it far too suddenly
while my existence was anchored to you,
while our things was limitless deep
and we both were trusting on God
while now alone I search for answers,
where without you I see a new tomorrow,
while suddenly pain cuts unexpectedly through me
and I in despair try to cling
to the little that remain of you
and forever we are separate from each other,
you are buried in your coffin and I know sorrow.
V
You are buried in your coffin and I know sorrow
and no stranger asks about you or walks past,
there are people dressed in black
everywhere in the church around me
and everyone is disenchanted
where they are mourning
and it's as if nothing can break through the darkness
that appears about you a pretty girl, already a woman
and suddenly the minister starts talking at the front,
the sexton walks to the back and asks: 'who is lying here? '
his voice resounds through the whole church
and he gets no answer.
The service passes much too quickly;
I feel like I can fight against God.
VI
I feel like I can fight against God,
I cannot really know,
why some people lead longer lives
and for others life is measured out into darkness,
still less I know for what I am searching,
something stays just out of my reach
as if it is involved with the things that are happening
and just when I look it's already gone,
it's just beyond the bright blue
as if I am living with an incomplete purpose
where I am almost seeing it, it's almost in my thoughts
but I cannot see or feel it
and I know that something terrible is wrong,
where everything eventually becomes chaos.
VII
Where everything eventually becomes chaos,
where the whole world are waiting on disintegration,
I wonder what makes me languish
for new life, for the rain that pours down?
What lets me hope that very soon
a glorious age, a glorious day will appear
on the other side of the dark night
while everything around me with time collapses?
Now I hope to have someone else again,
that your life and hours of pain disappear
and again I want to begin with someone anew,
while I stay trusting that the answers lie in the hands of God,
while I believe that the sun will shine on me again
with someone new to adore.
poem by Gert Strydom
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Faceless This Time Of Night
Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice
into a deepening sense of containment
by a dark space with distant cities of light
trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,
or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles
dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains
across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,
the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars
with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.
The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss
of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard
when you were a kid, the mere filament
of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan
of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,
disappointed it wasn't born a flower,
but a weed more at home among the stars
that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth
like a kindred spirit of light
that must wander through its own solitude
like music at night from an open window
in the life of the mind to reach out to them
like a tendril of smoke from the embering nugget
of the heart nesting in a private crown of fire
that abdicated its empire of ashes for a single note
of the night bird's longing to sing back up
like a bell for a sad universe that's always on the road.
I hear crying in the distance, the dark lament of the hills.
The night creek weeping unseen through hidden valleys.
I can taste the deaths and sorrows, the broken promises
of the rain, drifting like the fragrance of a waterlily
like a star reflected on the undivined watershed of its tears
saturating the air. Matter a condensation of the light,
I can feel life moving through this body, this flesh,
this scrap of starmud, a rush of water, a gust of stars,
a purple passage of blood, a breath of fire and wind,
and the earth, not solid, but real, animating all my limbs,
my vital organs like the ripening fruit of a rootless tree
as if time wept like a bell in me as well, and its tears,
heavy with the weight of too many separations,
yet wise in the ways of the sky, sweetened the fall to come.
poem by Patrick White
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Afternoon Musings 7
sometimes i miss a friend
who talks to me without knowing
what time is
one who is carefree and freewilling
like the way we blow the bubbles
of soap and water in the air
when we laughed so loud
when we were those naughty children
sometimes i miss the times
when we bathe in the river
naked with our innocence
plunging in the noise and the rage
of the rippling waters
and not thinking about
what we are or who we are
or what do we become of ourselves
i miss the times when we simply bask
under the sun to dry our wet tight bodies
when we close our eyes under such a strong light
and see the comfort of orangeness inside us
i miss the times when we simply sit on the grass
on early afternoons watching the sun setting on the sea
waiting till it becomes dark when the stars come
like an array of friends to the full moon slowly
ascending, and how all of them shine and though
so distant from us, they all appear to be happy
in that glimmer and glitter, on that summer
many years ago before the coming of death & despair
poem by Ric S. Bastasa
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Pain Of Losing You
I’m going through the pain of losing you
It’s a pain I can not bear
I always had your love, with you
That I could share.
So many memories that flash through my mind
Of all those precious moments and all the beautiful times.
Of walking down the street holding each others hand
Smiling with each other, and the future that we planned.
Sitting in the park till the moment that it got dark
Then looking up to the sky, and trying to count the stars.
When looking in your eyes, I felt like I was floating
High in the sky with all the stars above
Searching every star for your everlasting love.
I recall when we met, it seems so long ago
That I had asked you if you wanted to see a show.
You gave me a smile which I never could forget
Then you cracked a joke that I remember yet.
All these memories stay running in my mind
And I can’t stop them, and I don’t want to try.
Memories are like the ocean waves that
Beat against the shores, they are here now
And will be forever more.
The pain of losing you leaves me angry deep inside
For I know, that it wasn’t your time to die.
I know that GOD works in mysterious ways
And every night I ask him, as I get on my knees to pray.
I saw you in my dreams last night, and I heard
You gently say, that you truly love me
But with GOD you have to stay.
He had taken you for a reason which I would
Not understand, but everything you do was
to help your fellow man.
So with a sadness that I feel deep in my heart
With these words I love you, we will now part.
We will be together in the afterlife
And that’s when I’ll ask you if you’ll be my wife.
poem by Louis Rams
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Eyes In The Shadows, In Blood, In Space
Eyes in the shadows, in blood, in space, incubating the light
that has yet to be born, wild asters in the deflowered fields of death,
and the return of the living out of the eyeless abyss, delinquent,
and a redness in the air of this September night,
saturating it like a deep wound it holds under its breath,
a black rose, a fossilized thorn that no longer grows old,
memories fixed like crucified bats to the sticky brown stars
of the fanatical burdock trying to wear me like a starmap
as if every day of my life has felt like the approach of autumn
watching the constellations turn like the pages of a calendar,
a waterclock of new moons flowing like dark matter,
sundials at midnight encircling me like shark fins
slashing the water like sabres with surgical precision
and their eyes, oblivion, a focus of shadows, perennial night
after a supernova of dismemberment, dehumanizing horrors
in a hydrodynamic abattoir. Spirits of old root fires
smelling of pine and cedar at large in the dark like hunting magic.
And the clouds a wolf pack of shapeshifters among the stars,
the exhilaration of spiritual wariness out in the woods alone at night
where it's unwise to trust anything too beautiful at first sight,
and a sudden flash of inspired self-destructive courage
to do just that in protest of the abuse of beauty as a Venus fly trap.
But it's not hard to tell a real muse from a false one
because a real muse never wastes her passion on the sane,
and if there isn't an occult side to a poet who works his madness
like a medium in the dark he had to sacrifice his eyes to see
beyond the visuals of the retinas and the cameras
with lizard eyelids that blink like guillotines, into
these visionary realms where galaxies are shed
like the feathers of migrating swans, gravity's gone,
and if you want to go up, you've got to go up without a parachute on.
Mystic physics. The illogic of the heart delighting
in the absurdity of itself just because it can and you can hear
a sword master of black Zen singing his heart out in a brothel:
A good heretic never disciplines his disobedience.
The brutal moon offers me the cup of my own skull
and says drink, and I know it's death to hesitate
because you lose control of everything in the moment
if you do, so I drink it like an elixir of dark tears
from the eye of the shark in eclipse, and I peer
into the black mirror of a midnight lake to see
if I'm still alive or dead, and the mirror breaks
like the unleavened bread of a gnostic gospel in my hands,
wholly enraptured by a spell I wasn't ready to wake up from,
and I can feel the lustrous radiance of a light
so inconceivably darker than the one I go by
like a shadow of that, the ferocity of the clarity
immolates my heart with a terrible joy
in a prophetic furnace of hot diamonds
that howl like the insights of a firestorm of dragons in extasis
breaking out of their cosmic shells like stars out of the void
shining out of the dark heart of things within
like eyes seasoned by compassion
for the low hanging bells and fruits of the earth
trying to express the infinite solitude between birth and death
where we walk alone together forever with everyone
and everything, like pilgrims sleepwalking
in the unattainable dream that animates us all
to keep on divining the inspired limitations of the impossible.
poem by Patrick White
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Things Might Be Drifting Away
Things might be drifting away
like an empty lifeboat
with nothing left to save
but the memory of moonlight
on the rush of a wave of the heart
that rose and fell
like a bell of insight on the night watch
that said all's well all's well for the night.
And so it was for a while.
Time might seem
that it's overstaying its welcome
and you've become the estranged guest
of a bad dream
in your own bed
in the thirteenth house of the zodiac
where the dispossessed
shack up with the misbegotten
and the ghosts of everything you've forgotten
don't give you any rest
until all that you've cursed
out of anger and need
has been immensely forgiven and blessed.
And perhaps it appears
you've been the rogue star
of a sign in long exile
far away from now
and that might account
for your misplaced trust in mirrors
and your lack of confidence in star maps.
Happiness just happens
like good luck and grace
and the creative inspiration
to rejoice in your time and place here
as if the purpose of your voice
were always to praise
even on the darkest of days
when the only thing
that shone in your eyes
weren't the stars you kept
locked away in your tears
like the face paint of clowns
or the crown jewels of the Pleiades
but a bitter farce of black holes
in the veils of the mirage
that eclipsed your enlightenment
with a starless night
it's impossible to get beyond.
And so it may well be
for those who've been
as far gone for as long you have.
But even the blind are shining
though they can't see it
and the deaf are still singing
though they can't hear it
and the dead are still living
though they can't feel it.
And those who have given up seeking
still find what they were looking for
like a loveletter with a return address
and an open door that recognizes them
like the prodigal threshold
of a homeless human
about to cross one more
like the last step of a long journey
that lost its way back in all directions
like the radiance of a star in space and time
that never took its eye off the past.
We cherish the flowers of summer that bloom last
more poignantly than those of the spring
because we feel our own hour of farewell
in the progress of their passing.
The sadness of an earthly excellence
fulfilled and surpassed
we see in the shedding of the aster's petals
and in the lowering of the wild rose's eyelids
and in the lengthening of the black walnut's shadows
that move like cool water
across the dry grass of a late afternoon
signs of the same night approaching us.
And we know it will be dusk soon.
We'll look up at the blue moon in late October
and whether the silos are full or empty
wonder if every harvest
wears the same death mask we do
with the smile of a scythe on its face
or if the goddess of the grain
bears true witness to
the perennial innocence of death
in the way she enhances
the white spectre of the first frost
to shock the garden down to its roots
with the same koan she uses
to enlighten the dew on the stargrass.
And you might dread the coming excruciations
of the scarecrow immolated on the pyre
of its own substance
like the short straw of flesh
that once sustained it
lost in a draw with death.
And come to scorn your heart like an urn
filled with ashes in the aftermath
of the same fire that once filled it
so full of desire to bloom
it could no more contain itself
than a seed can keep a secret from the spring.
You could see it that way.
And who among those clinging
like a blue atmosphere
to this homeless grain of dust
in the vastness of these sidereal immensities
within and without
that animate us like starmud
to join in this dance of life and death
like a legacy of shining
that can't be washed out of our eyes
though tears have fallen for lightyears
on the root fires of what we've loved and lost.
Who among these
could say you were wrong?
Because no river's flowing
the wrong way to the sea
in this reunion of arrivals and departures
at the stations of our afterlives
on this wheel of birth and death.
We're all going to make it back
to where we came from
one way or another.
Some like rain.
Some like ice.
Some like snow.
Some like the lingering ghost
of morning mist on the lake
that's gone before noon
and some like water on the moon.
The flowing of the river
summoned by the sea
to the source of its coming and going
is the calling of life everywhere
to transcend itself
by passing into the unknown
like the available dimension of a future
that's no further beyond us
than the past is
in the light of distant stars.
The sword doesn't wound itself.
Fire doesn't burn itself.
Water doesn't drown in itself.
And life doesn't bleed out of itself
like the dream of a fortune-telling poppy
or a water clock that's run itself to ground.
The eye isn't the seeing.
The ear isn't the hearing.
The tongue isn't the tasting.
The skin isn't the touching.
The voice isn't the saying.
The brain isn't the thinking.
The heart isn't the feeling
anymore than life
is the carrying in
and death is the bearing out.
The darkness isn't a lack of light
and the light isn't the absence of night.
Death is unborn.
Life is unperishing.
Formless in a world of forms.
Two wavelengths of the same awareness.
You say you can see night gathering
under the door you're afraid to answer
long before anyone knocks
and though you dream by your own light
you don't know who's casting the shadows.
Is sorrow any younger in the heart of a child
than it is in the memory of an old man?
Joy any less vivid in the eyes of an old woman
attending to the flowers in her garden
than it is in a girl having tea with her dolls?
Is this day not as new to the widow
as it is to the newly-wed?
Experience is the capstone and dunce-cap
of the sum of destructions
that made us who we are today.
And in life it's the brilliance of our failures
that throws more light on the dark matter
of the issue before us
than all the star power
of the blazing successes
that blind us to our own shining.
You step out of a backlit doorway
into the dark
and slowly the darkness grows
the eyes you need to see the stars.
And maybe death is like that.
Nothing to look at but black
until we blow the candle out
that's been misleading us all the way.
Maybe that's why the jaws of skulls
are always caught gaping at something
that's more than they can say.
But look at the expressions on their faces.
Maybe their eyes
are too overwhelmed by what they're seeing
to want to get in the way.
You could see it like that.
You could see it through the eyes of the rain.
You can taste it on the tongue of a candle flame.
You can read it from right to left
in the Kufic script of the wind.
You can hear it in what the stars are whispering
through the keyholes in the pyramids.
You can feel it all around you
like bubbles of skin and air.
Like empty rooms with atmosphere.
As many ways and roads and rivers as there are
that flow into it down the world mountain
back to the sea
back to the same undifferentiated watershed
of these myriads of mystic specificity
and who could number them all
as many as the stars
or all the grains of sand
of all the deserts and beaches on earth
as many as the dead of every kind who've come and gone
all that blood mind passion dream and imagination
all those tears all that despair lucidity and apprehension
love and familial affection
all that waste and hatred and emotional sewage
dissolved wholly back into the sea
like a watercolour left out in the rain
like a name written on water
by a poet who died young
in a foreign language far away from home
just as birth arrays the universe before us
and says make of it what you can
so death approaches no less a peer of life
than we are in our relationship with all things
and offers us
the same great creative opportunity life does.
Green bough.
Dead branch.
Sunset.
Moon rise.
The hidden night bird alights
on either alike
and folding its wings
like gates and books
and the eyelids of those who dream
at the beginning and end
of a long dark radiant journey,
sings.
poem by Patrick White
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Besides
When I look inside the lines
When I look beside the black and white
You put my world in color
You’ve painted me a picture of my life
With laughs, and love, and you
When I look inside your eyes
I feel your pain
I feel your love
I see my future with you
When I look beyond the sea
When I look inside the dunes
You make me fly, high above the water
You’ve opened up a passage of my life
With tears, and pain, and you
When I look inside the sea
I see how deep you are
I see the waves of your past
I see my future with you
When I look up in the skies
When I see through the clouds
I soar beyond all belief into the heavens and above
You’ve given me faith and hope for all the world
When I look to the stars
I see your faith
I see your dreams
I see my future with you
When I look at you
When I see your soul
We become one
You’ve given my life the colors, the passage, and the faith and hope I need
When I look to you
I have no more fears
I have no more troubles
And I see my future with you for now and forever
poem by Isabella Epona
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Gray Rain
Gray rain
but the trees
are teaching the stars how to break into leaves.
Good rain on the good earth.
Autumn's a long passage.
Spring is full of thresholds.
Rainbow bridges in the distance
over urgent streams.
Everything's in a rush to become something.
I thought I knew once
who I was supposed to be
but more and more it eludes me
like a future that's already behind me.
I leave it to the world
to finish what I began
and include myself in the mystery
and try to carry on like a man
who looks at a star he won't follow
through the branches of the burgeoning trees
as the history of who I am
now that I'm not anymore.
The less I am the more there is to be.
And one eye doesn't get in the way of the other as much.
There is just this as it is
and what am I beholding
if I'm not looking upon myself as I am
in common with everything
that's changing all around me
like a mind that can't contain itself
in any fixed mode of being
anymore than the eye
can decide what it's seeing.
Everything is burning with life in the rain
and change is the dangerous bliss
we feel when we cease to exist.
The trees might have fingerprints
graven into their bark
and you might accord them
an identity in the dark
and approve of their names
and let them pass as if you knew who they were
but that doesn't make them
any less of a stranger than you are
or the clouds carry passports.
Praise be to the abundance of oblivion
and the cornucopias of blackholes
in the hearts of the galaxies
that keep wounding themselves into life
by falling on their own swords
like a knife that heals.
By day the light gives.
But at night
it steals.
And the mirror lives
and pours water over the eyes of the blind
and suddenly the stars can see again.
And the grape hyacinth is drunk on blue wine.
And I'm walking on water on the moon
even as the moon walks on my tears
without knowing which ones
flowed from the bells of my sorrows
and which overwhelmed me
like birds in the fountains of joy.
First I am a man.
And then I am a boy.
Spring takes itself for granted.
And autumn comes on with regrets.
But they both know
this is as good as it gets
and nothing's missing
in the mind's lost and found.
It's just the way things get around
when you throw the world back in the water
like a life of your own
you gave up years ago
to be who you are now.
Praise be to the stars
that stop by the gate this late
to chat about gardens
and how to keep
the roots of the roses alive
when the ground hardens.
Even if you're a demon in steep descent
or an angel rising from hell
life has the power of a flower
and the genius of a universe
to turn falling into a calling
like planets and Canada geese.
You can walk out alone
into a wide open field at night like I do
and stand there under the stars
that have been staring at you since childhood
like someone they should keep an eye on
and say: This is me. This is who I am as I am
to the whole twinkling lot of them in self-defence
to uphold the savage dignity of the difference.
You can stand there in the vastness
of that one definitive thought
that goes on forever like a silence older than birds
and feel the sweet release of upending joy
trying to master its new freedom
when space morphs into a mouth for a moment
and says softly
o so softly
in a voice that's been singed by compassion:
No.
You're not.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Have Become My Own Season
I have become my own season
living through these renewable eras of you
that come and go
like the fragrances of passing stars
that sometimes stop by the gate
to talk about the garden blooming late.
Some flowers wait for the moon to open,
to throw their arms around space
as if they could encompass everything
in the brief embrace of their petals,
and their seeing is one eye under multiple eyelids
as they burn like jewels in the night
to keep it all shining and bright.
But I've worn out the elbows
of my insatiable longing
on the windowsills of a different insight.
Saddened by the distance, the time, the circumstances,
delinquent desires still hanging out their shingles
like green apples on a dead branch in winter,
withering like the inconsolable eyes of old men
who have died like sons
and now must die like fathers,
mine is the darker radiance
of the faint halo of light
around a black hole
that summons everything
down into it like the sea
sitting below its own salt
at a stranger's table.
You can't look into
the black mirrors in my house
with your eyes open
because they only reflect
what's on the back of your eyelids
where the only light is your own
and you are the road
and the lantern you go by
and everything you feel and think and imagine
is your own true face without skin
not the gate between outside and in.
How could I ever recognize you
in these dark spaces
if it weren't for the trees
and the stars and the moon
and the night stream that runs through me
like a lifeline on the palm of my hand
down from the mountains
in a rush of diamonds and gold
that pour out like the pent-up emotions
of a sword that's just been pulled from a stone?
And how hugely alone the night is
when you love someone as they are
and you realize without effort
that if you hold them a moment in their transience
you hold them like a star in a locket of water
that tastes like the past.
There are people
like treebound barrels of rain
and then there are people like me
who leak out of their lives
like radioactive water
that couldn't pool the pain
long enough to stop the meltdown
long enough to cool the brain,
long enough to let it kill me.
Now in the darkness
seeded with the dust of black dwarfs
trying to clench a fist of coal into diamonds
my auroras are weeping neon dew
like a cheap enlightenment
all over the watercolours of dawn.
And I'm wondering
what kind of an afterlife is this
that I might have foregone
if I were indifferent
to how my solitude deranges me
like a lost continent
wandering through its own mindscapes
like an extinguished star
that wants to make up
just for one luminous moment
a constellation of its own
that doesn't wait upon anyone's eyes
for the themes of its seeing.
And though the skies have changed
like the slides of childhood dreams
with every blink of an eyelid
whenever night approaches me
and asks to sit by my fire
and let the flames and the smoke
of our past lives
speak for the both of us
I look up to give my eyes
like two drops of water
back to their oceanic immensities
and it's always unattainably you
that is shining
like a woman in the window
of a secret house of the zodiac
far off the beaten path
that leads everywhere like a firefly.
And your stars speak to me
as if my flesh were light again
and my heart
that bumps its way through the dark
already a lamp beyond
the Lazarus of wax
that's buried in his own lucidities
like a candle I left for dead.
poem by Patrick White
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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A Little Thought In A Big Space
A little thought in a big space, I'm falling
through my own immensities here at my desk,
one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.
My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.
I'm on the dark side of my eyes.
No one's ever been here before.
No window, no wall, no door,
I'm on the threshold of my homelessness again.
I'm looking at stars, but I feel like rain.
I'm talking to ghosts that I don't remember.
Might be the wrong medium, but it's the right seance.
I don't even know what I'm doing here myself
but it seems I'm free to go or stay as I wish.
I'm wearing my shadow like a candling parachute
that didn't step back from the edge in time.
No point in pretending you're an airborne dandelion
when you feel like a rock with a message
someone just threw like the moon through a mirror
disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.
No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial
if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.
Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke
before you came. And these words that are saying me here
have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.
Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?
Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away
from the lunar eclipses that aren't in need of enlightenment.
Don't know if I'm a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,
or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out
by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.
If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open
with a crowbar or a koan, and it's nightfall, it's
time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock
and see how the stars emerge out of nothing
as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing
that let's everything happen spontaneously by itself.
Even if you're the lighthouse of your dreams
that doesn't mean you're the nightwatchman
keeping his third eye on you in the shadows
like a theft of fire you can get away with
this second time around with only a warning.
If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
And if you did, whining about it in your sleep
isn't going to help and who's Spartan enough these days
to stash the fox under their tunic to keep
from being caught while it eats them alive?
If you want to be a dragon you've got to learn
to swallow people's hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,
without wincing. The stars don't come out
like emergency candles you've been saving
for exactly this kind of situation. And if
you really want to know the truth about illumination,
try and blow one out. Quick, now, look
and see immediately into the clear light of the void
what it's like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.
The stars here don't hide their nakedness under a cloak
of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in
but give nothing back like the second hand clothes
of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all
like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds
dazzled by how much a single eye can contain
whether it's hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall
or going down the drain in spring. I know
you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace
and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is
as unique among billions as you think you are,
there's not a star in the sky that isn't a rite of passage.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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No Gravegoods In My Solitude
No gravegoods in my solitude, no trinkets
from any spiritual world inside or outside this one.
The totem belongs to the dream that's buried with it
as the flower's engendered by the root it's taken from.
Mind is matter. Matter is mind. And it isn't as if
one is blind to the other because one shore
isn't parted from the other by the flowing
of the mindstream in between. Try to separate
the reflection of the moon from water in a dream state.
The moon is a characteristic of water as the water
is a feature of the moon. If you want to mediate
until you turn the vertebrae of your spine into a bridge
to get to the other side of a life you're already standing on,
that's ok as long as it's burning. Otherwise it's just going
to obstruct your path when you're shooting the rapids
of the Milky Way like your own spring run off
trying to saddle a rush of stars with a rudderless liferaft
and oars for spurs. Better to be a waterbird
with wings of your own, but what a thrill
to ride the snake until you can fly like a dragon
among the stars like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,
in the handle of the Big Dipper like a warrior Bedouin
testing his eyes on the dune of a tribal hourglass to see
if he can tell what hour it is by the dance of a distant binary.
It's getting late. Nightwatch at the well. The town
unpeopled by sleep. A choir of train whistles
practising their inquisitive requiems at every crossing
like Canada geese migrating south when the autumn stars arise.
More lonely than mournful, I can taste the shadows
in the honey of life as readily as the light. I can smell
the fragrance of time like the first snowflakes
in a lover's hair, trying to turn her into a constellation
to sweeten the night air. And even in the ashes
of the starmaps the shining sets afire
and scatters like a library in the urn of the heart
on a wind that carries away the passions of this art
of exhuming more life out of a shallow grave than went into it,
I can still burn in the dark like the ore
of undisciplined diamonds. I can still squander my light
on the eyelids of the fallen flowers like a final kiss farewell.
Time wastes a death on me. Years ago the wind arose
and blew that candle out in the open window
of an abandoned house and ever since I've been
drifting like a ghost of smoke in a diaspora of stars.
I bequeath to the rose, the blood of my wounds.
To the thorns of the moon, my scars. To the night
I leave my eyes. To the wind, my breath. My voice
to the nightbird whose longing put my lyrics
to the picture-music that's haunted me all my life
like the song of someone who loved me once
before I was born and began to forget. But my heart
that I could judge the worth of like a bell bound to the earth,
or a feather of fire in hell, in the palm of my hand,
I give that to everyone like the windfall of a tree in a storm.
Black walnuts and wild apples. Solar systems
of peaches and pears in the leftover orchards
of organic gardens bearing the fruit of a habitable planet
at the autumn equinox of the New England asters
and modest suns of the Jerusalem artichokes
for the birds and the squirrels and the bears.
You can't keep what you won't give away
and it's no good to you in a grave when it comes time
to throw yourself overboard to stay afloat
and weather the squalls on your own sea of awareness
like an empty moonboat drifting through the fog
calling out to anyone who'll listen on the coast
of a new universe that discovers you like Atlantis
to a ghost of the old world looking for a passage
back to the more familiar labyrinth of home.
Liberation is freedom through creative form, not from it.
Liberation is life. And life is all entrance, no exit.
And you weren't asked at the door for any i.d.
And no one's going to stop you from lowering the fire escape
to get away from yourself. And if you were to ask
the mirrors of your own awareness, they'd stop staring at you
as if they'd never seen a new world savage before.
Everyone's going to leave an empty chair at the table
sooner or later. Like the skull cup of the moon
you've got to pour your prophetic lees out upon the earth
if you want to give your abundance another chance.
You can make lanterns out of fireflies in canning jars
or you can abandon them to the spiders
in the corners of your eyes like dreamcatchers and kites,
but if you want to shine of your own accord,
albino fish in the darkest depths with stars in their eyes,
you've got to see the sun flowering at midnight,
you've got to greet Venus in the Pleiades at dawn.
You've got to unsilver the mirror like a stripper
until you disappear like a bird in the house of life
through an open window like a crack in a cosmic egg
to feel the vastness of the sky that transcends
the limit of your wings. Despite the eye-witness
in the mirror, where time is always in arrears to eternity,
you've got to give it all up like your shining reflection
if you want to stay here for your own protection.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Trying To Express
Trying to express a more immediate intimacy
with the life of the mind
without attributing a form to madness
might just be another way
of looking for comic relief
from the actual facts
of the tragic folly that confronts us
like a world that won't tolerate any mask
you want to put on it for long
to lie about the atrocity of your irrelevance
and pretend you don't know
what you're looking at.
I dream I suffer the same
corpuscular purpose as a paramecium.
I wake up from these desert mirages
and it's true.
OK it's true.
Next.
Because nothing in life is an endgame.
And despite the full stop like an empty cup
at the end of a thought
with the lifespan of a punctuation mark
my cup runneth over like the new moon
and everything is drunk on the lunacy of its light.
It's not the content of life that matters
as much as the way space bends
to accommodate it.
It's not the wine
it's the emptiness of the cup
that shapes the forms of our knowing
so that they can be grasped
by our eyes and hands
as separate things in the world.
Mind is a poet a potter a painter a parent a prophet
that will not be bound by its own works
or the laws of the defenceless who expound them.
Look out into space
and the furthest you will ever see
is a face in the mirror that's older than matter.
Space is a vehicle of transformation
that doesn't go anywhere
because anywhere it goes
its wheels are centered
in the still points of themselves
as we are to our navels.
And all lifelines
straight or otherwise
are emanations of its radiance.
Order and logic and reason
are the dry wishbones of the fearful
looking for predictability in a world
that can't be contained
by a unified field theory
or an elaborated straitjacket
on the fashion ramps of science.
Physics says one size fits all
but by the time the spiders
are finished weaving it
the sleeves are always too short
to keep up with a universe
that's growing at the speed of light
and I'd rather walk naked
in the skin of my own clarity
than be clothed
in someone else's hand-me-downs.
I'm not out hunting birds and butterflies
with a dreamcatcher.
I'm not looking for peace and healing
by abstaining from myself
like a promise I broke to my ancestors.
Everyone was born a lifeboat
in an abysmal sea of awareness
or they wouldn't be here to know it.
So who needs to be saved?
Or is there some kind of holy war going on
between the lifeboats and the waves?
And where does Jerusalem go
to free itself of infidels
when it goes on crusade?
All waves are waterbells
that never stop tolling
and the mindstream
they're raised upon
is in everyone
the sum of what's holy about life.
Learn to transcend your certainties
if you want to get over your doubts.
Don't hoard the effects of your efforts
in the name of a good cause
that's so blinded by its own light
that it can't see
that there's as much randomness in the wonder
as there is in the horror.
That what's most terrifying about life
is that it's free
of anything you can say or feel or think about it.
That every part in every moment
is not the sum
but the consummation of the whole
that roots and flowers in everyone
as if it were a secret
that bloomed for them alone.
To know the names of things
like the names of stars and flowers
is to look at them from the outside.
Who called you Eve?
Who called you Adam?
If you know your name
you're already in exile.
But it was not us
who were driven out of the garden.
Knowledge drives the garden out of us.
It turns our eyes around
so we can't see Eden from the inside
where our beginnings are always now
and we are no more dispossessed
of our innocence
than the passion expressed by a flower
in a loveletter to the light
can be disenchanted
of the insight that inspired it.
What's truly tragic about life when it seems so
is not that it's evil
but that it's innocent
and its innocence is older than compassion.
The moon sheds its phases.
The flower its petals.
They're always coming and going
from the same abyss they're heading into.
The emptiness engenders this abundance
out of its own potential for growth
and even death is not culpable.
This is space.
That is space.
But the two
can no more be separated
than a wave can be from water.
You don't need a unified field theory
to understand unity.
You don't need to hold a mirror up
to your face
to see your own reflection
when you can see yourself in everything.
What does space look like to space?
Mind to mind?
Light to light?
The dreamer to the dream?
What could God possibly say to herself
that she didn't already know?
There's nothing hidden.
There's nothing secret.
There's nothing that escapes detection.
There's no simulacrum for the void
that elaborates everyone's likeness.
There's no dead metaphor in the word
waiting to be resurrected.
The absolutes may be in denial
about the way things seem
but even when their eyes
burn through glass like stars
lost in their own immensities
they can't impress the darkness
with a theory of cosmic shadows.
They don't need to look
any further into space
than the ends of their noses
to see the constellations
casting them
across the universe
like the shadows of the stars
that aren't there anymore
trying to throw a light on black matter
by noting its absence.
Gravitational eyes devoid of light.
Black holes without keys
in the doors of perception.
Dry wishing wells on the moon
that have never plumbed the depths
of their bottomless longing
to hear something irrevocably truer
than the echoes of their own voices
coming back to them
like crows and doves to an ark.
By the time you know it
any event is over.
By the time you see the dawn
the sun has already set.
In the seed of every insight
you can read your own gravestone.
You can see there's as much death in it
as there is life.
You can feel the spring coming on
as if you were already buried
under the savage tiger-lilies.
And you can ask
until you're as blue in the face as a hyacinth
what it all meant
after you're dead
out in the incredible open
that's closed to the living
just past the end of their fingertips.
Or if it ever meant anything at all.
You can see and be it this way.
You can go on a long journey
to a prison or a shrine or a hospital
and return home
with no more insight
than you had when you left.
And still wonder if it was all worth it.
Because no experience of life
is truer than another
reality is not separated
from our awareness of it
nor subject to reform.
There is no norm
that isn't a prevailing illusion by consensus.
But the desert isn't looking for water
and only the one-eyed fools
mistake their eye-patchs
for an eclipse of the moon
and their own mirages
for a new way of thinking
when it's thinking's best virtue not to have one.
People and things are ok as they are
but they don't realize it.
They keep trying to live up
to their own reflections.
They keep trying to sweep
the stars and the deserts
off their front stairs
looking for a stairway to heaven
where the dust of the world
can't find a place to rest.
But time is a pulse of the heart
not the heavy pendulum
of a grandfather clock
and as Pablo Neruda once wisely said
the poetry is under your fingernails
and I would less wisely add
as is heaven.
No one's on the wrong path
once they open both their eyes
to what's underfoot
whether you're walking
on water stars or fireflies
or riding dolphins.
Whether your road
is a shoelace or smoke
or the lifeline of an umbilical cord
measured in wavelengths and lightyears
or your journey's still
an astronaut in the womb.
Mirrors holding mirrors up
to judgement for their spots.
Narcissus doesn't like what he's looking at.
So what?
The roads don't suddenly
turn back on themselves
because they lack floors
and a place of their own.
Heaven uses the same return address as hell.
But when death comes knocking in Aleppo
and you're out walking your own mile
in your own shoes
to nowhere in particular
free of arrivals and departures
no one's ever home
and every threshold you cross
is not hindered by an exit or an entrance.
Some walk.
Some run.
Some swim.
Some fly.
Some crawl.
Some ride.
Some dance.
And some sit still by the window
growing younger by the moment
the longer they look into the distance.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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You Never Became A Memory
You never became a memory.
You remain as you are in my life.
A living compassionate presence.
I have forgotten more of me
than I ever could of you.
Whenever I want to see beyond the light
I see through your eyes
everything you wanted to show me
that was not petty or tragic or cruel.
I was a profound fool
but you taught me how
to add my darkness to the night
to enhance the shining.
And even now
when things aren't flowering well
I still reach out for you by deepening my roots.
As if I could touch your face again
like a muse of water
lost in her own reflection.
As if I could ignite the same fires again
that blossomed on the dead branch
of the witching wand
that inspired the stars
who thought they had seen everything
to marvel at their own perfection in you.
Inspiratrix of the blue waterstars
that burned like chandeliers
among the constellations of the lilies
pluming themselves like swans
in the feathers of the moon,
how I long to be eclipsed and enlightened again
like a chameleon reflecting the mood of your beauty
as I did before these windows came
like glass-eyed calendars between us
to prove that time isn't space. It's pain.
And change is an absolute
that doesn't like its relatives.
My angel misses you.
My demon misses you
so badly at times
I can't look into the abyss for long
without impeaching my mind
for its awareness of an emptiness
that aches like an existential absurdity
to be put out of its misery
for being born blind deaf and dumb
about whose wind on the waters is rocking
the cradles and crucibles of creation.
The Medusa holds her tits out
like snakepits and grails
and I never know which one to drink from
or if the poison and the antidote
are just the opposite fangs of the moon
as it grows through its waxing and waning
as if a physician found a way
of healing herself
by sloughing her wounds like skin.
The mindstream weaves its way at night
like a garden snake
through myriad blades of grass
like the shuttle of a loom
that doesn't know what theme of life
unspools in the flowing.
And my eyes miss you like light.
I'm a lighthouse on the shore of a dead sea
trying to walk on water like the moon
as the waves chip away at me
like shale flakes off the cold stone
that edges slowly through my heart like a thorn.
And it may make a king of me
to draw the sword out of the stone
but that doesn't close the wound
of having first to fall upon it
to vacate my throne with honour.
If life is the truth
then lying is the only way
to describe death to a god
who doesn't understand it.
What's a church without gravestones?
Aspiration without an expiry date?
And so many different kinds of death
not enough generations of humans
have been born yet to know them all.
Death tries to trivialize the relative
as if the things I miss most about you
had never been.
But your mindwaters are mingled with mine inextricably
like the shoreless starstreams of space
panning for planets in our flowing
we might live on
and have our being and our breath
unblighted by loss. Separation. Death.
And there is no more of the sadness
I used to see in your eyes
as if they were my own
that I still see everywhere in the eyes of all living things
when I know as you would have had me know
as clearly as you did
that even though the neverness
of implacable circumstances and lost last chances
may have separated us like the threads of the rope
you used to climb up to heaven before me
like one who took the short-cut
and one who took the long way home through these starfields
taking his painful time
like the unfulfilled hope of a child
he's not alone when he opens his eyes
like a dream within a dream
that looks but can't find him,
you can polish the missing into a mirror
and wait like a fox by a black hole for things to appear
that will never be the same again
or you can open your tears like windows
and let out the birds of pain
that I have kept as close to me
as the whisper of your voice
in this cold, dark chimney
telling me to let you go as I do now
to rejoice on the dead branch and the green bough
like the flower and flame
of what became of us.
We cannot be the song or the singer
for very long
as our voices dim like candles in the darkness
that have given it all away.
And as you used to say
as if it would always be today without you
and all we have given is all we could keep of each other
like water returned to the river
we raised to our lips to taste
the sad, last drops
of these eyeless elixirs of the moon
that linger like vapours
in the empty goblets of the morning glory,
and I need to believe you more than I do
in this neverness of now
that has come before me without a beyond
or a word from all that has irrevocably gone.
Yes. But the singing. That goes on.
poem by Patrick White
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Flowers Adrift On The Fragrance Of Their Own Foregoing
Flowers adrift on the fragrance of their own foregoing.
In the night that takes me under its wing
to shelter me from myself, arrival and passage of spring.
Fish nibble at the wafer of the moon on the tongue of the lake.
The wind bitter as a green apple with an innocent cruel side.
Saturn at dawn, Venus at dusk, things abide in their own good time
without knowing for whose sake they shine until the mind
can't keep a secret anymore and let's the heart know
what the heart has always known. Reason is colour blind.
Everything that's hidden out in the open isn't invisibly camouflaged
to look like God at a quick glance. Flowers don't dance
with their deathmasks on. Things may have changed
since I last walked here, but they haven't aged. Autumn
not an older season than spring, spring not younger than yesterday.
Water's never heard of a virgin birth that ends in a real death.
Silence of time as it appears to the spirit in a deepening sea of awareness.
Nothing disfigured. Nothing restored. Nothing scarred.
Nothing wounded in the moonlight, pleading to be healed.
Earth pungent with the expectations of urgent ghosts.
And dust in the eyes of the stars, the cries of Canada geese
with more longing in their voices than celebration
like the wailing of a train disappearing like smoke in the distance
from a sad fire in danger of going out. Exits and entrances galore
there are as many ways out of here as there is space and time to stay.
Bush wolves on a far hill agonizing over something in the night
like blues harps of blood. And in the heartwood of every leafing tree
I can hear the first violins of a symphony tuning up to the light
as if something sublime were about to begin with the first dropp of rain
pinging like a tintinnabulum beside the kettledrum of thunder at the back.
To speak now would be to conceal what I really feel in words.
Lavish with life, I reveal my voice in a rush of waterbirds
startled off the lake like a mantra of sacred syllables
that nuance the ripples they leave in their wake
with a whole new way of phrasing the light with eyes
that see things musically as they fall away from their wings
like the meaning of things when meaning isn't necessary.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Out Here Alone
Out here alone so late at night
with all these spectacular stars
burning through the clean glass
of the freezing winter air
I can almost hear them thinking
behind the myths of the cover stories
they've told for years
dark truths about life and light
it would be madness in a man to understand.
Don't try to stuff the impersonal secret
of the universe
into your sentimental heart.
How could you ever fit its likeness
into a locket
and finger it lovingly as your own?
Out here alone so late
even if you have come
like a thief in the night
to steal from the light
when nobody's home
there are no cracks no facets no gaps
no backdoors, unlocked windows
or emergency exits,
no stairwells or entrances
in these jewels of insight
that can feel your eyes falling upon them
like rain running down a mirror
that shuts you out
like someone in the bathroom crying
for reasons that are light-years beyond you.
However deep and sincere your tears are
they're still only dry wells
in that vast ocean of awareness,
black snowflakes
on the roaring furnace of the abyss
and if you reach out with affection
hoping to make things better
by embracing it all
you're still only tendering a kiss
to the gaping jaws of your own lipless skull.
There's a silence older than space
in the bottomless heart of things
that makes intelligence seem
the unlikeliest of exaggerations
a human could ever mean
holding his mind up like a lamp to the stars
as if he could find his own way back by his own light
without the dream that themes his mindstream with creation.
But as foolish and futile as it is to surmise
or try to get a leg up on the wise
I don't think the darkness
is the negative space
around the troubled face that appeared
after all the dots were connected
like rising constellations
in a child's colouring book.
And I don't think there are gods
squatting like frogs
on the lotus of the world
making us up as they go along
like wheels and roads
to the grunts and groans
of an axial mating song
anyone could mistake for a joke.
And I don't think the stars
believe the things we say about them
or even remotely feel the mystic dread
of what it is to be a human
looking up at their shining
out of deeper darknesses within
where no direction can be given to the lost like eyes
that would never find their own way home again
were it not for the stars and fireflies that mislead us
from one illumination to the next
by giving the finger to the braille of the text
that would school a gust of stardust into us
like God gave life to Adam
and Eve gave life to God
long before there were any laws to blind them
like Satanic lightning bolts
uprooting their eyes like rain from the clouds
to put those fires out.
I look up at the stars
with the eyes of an exile
through the diaspora of my breath
and I want to think them all to death
like the people and things I've left behind me
when it was time to go my own way
anywhere into the darkness inside me
to see if I could shine a light upon myself
that didn't blind me to the fact
neither in the beginning
nor in the end
was I there to witness the act
that made a certainty as good as a doubt
to the great indifference
that wasn't trying to find me
like a needle of light in the heart of a haystack.
I look up at the stars
like a scarecrow in winter
trying to put its pants on
one leg after another
like a man
with nothing but time to burn
scattering his ashes among the stars
urn after urn
skull after skull
of the heretics and mystics
that were martyred by his scar-crossed heart
in the name of nothing real.
I don't know what they feel
but I look up at the stars
like a black rose
of blood and starmud
in the last death throes
of self-immolation
and see in my own image
what I've always had
in common with creation.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Solitude
How many times have you told me you love her
As many times as I've wanted to tell you the truth
How long have I stood here beside you
I live through you
You looked through me
Ooh, Solitude,
Still with me is only you
Ooh, Solitude,
I can't stay away from you
How many times have I done this to myself
How long will it take before I see
When will this hole in my heart be mended
Who now is left alone but me
Ooh, Solitude,
Forever me and forever you
Ooh, Solitude,
Only you, only true
Everyone leave me stranded
Forgotten, abandoned, left behind
I can't stay here another night
Your secret admirer
Who could it be
Ooh, Can't you see
All along it was me
How can you be so blind
As to see right through me
And Ooh, Solitude,
Still with me is only you
Ooh, Solitude,
I can't stay away from you
Ooh, Solitude,
Forever me and forever you
Ooh, Solitude,
Only you, only true
song performed by by Evanescence
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Sitting Here Becoming Whatever Drifts My Way
Sitting here becoming whatever drifts my way.
Cedar boughs smouldering in an attic to smoke the bats out.
Thought-watching without looking for the answer to anything.
Spiders like badges walking on the waters of my mind.
The autumn's new, but it's the same old passage of things.
Apples like bells in the trees of the steeples, shepherd moons
of sloppy solar systems strewn on the ground
with seeds that are going to take them down
a notch or two yet before they make a comeback.
Seven times down. Eight times up. Such is life.
I watch the picture-music flowing through my mind
like a home movie that's happening as fast as I am
playing the role of everybody else in the universe
all at once as if every ray of light incarnated
in the emanation of an essential existential insight
into the nature of every mystically specific human being
could all be traced back to the root of the same star.
And what does the star do when the many return to it
if not apocalyptically go supernova into transcendence.
Just because the ashes sleep sweetly in their firepits and urns,
doesn't mean they're not dreaming and scheming
to wake up from themselves
I'm firewalking in the ether like a sad volcano.
I'm alone in life and it's not as bad as I thought.
Prolonged solitude blurs the distinctions between
the trivial and the sublime. Beauty seems
the most engaging waste of time I know of.
I think about love more as an event than a thing,
and I've made enough attempts in my life
to convince me it wasn't for lack of trying
that I'm walking alone with the Alone like Plotinus
trying to keep my telescope in focus and stay open-minded.
But as John Keats said. If it come not as naturally
as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.
Space, too, has its sirens. And time, its lamias.
A gust of stars and the desert's full of fantasies.
A star blooms and a comet falls from its dark halo
like a queen bee looking to start a new hive
and I've seen enough oases with hourglass figures
turn into bag ladies in paradise to stay shy of gardens
that don't have any weeds in them that might
uproot me as so many have like a botanical mistake
as if I were some kind of hallucinogenic angel of death.
Amanita ocreata. A mushroom in the death cap
of a nuclear winter when all I am is interspecially creative
in the way I adapt to my extinctions. Attentive and tender
toward the flora and fauna that inhabit my solitude.
Though the peduncle is always lost in the ensuing phylum
as I am like the star in the eyes of the women
who've drowned me like a firefly in their tears,
I still send bouquets of constellations to the asylum
like the last of the New England asters this time of year.
Sanity might smudge the tomb with a noose of sweetgrass
but the madness stays clear as the waters of life
in the womb of enlightenment giving birth
to bubbles in hyperspace that can spontaneously pop
as easily as they cohere like skin to the shape shifting multiverse
for better and worse, and all the permutative modalities in between.
God bless them all. Each, a rite of passage
I stumbled through like the blessing
of an excruciating ordeal that seasons you
for what's to come, or who. I must have loved them
better than I thought to miss them as much as I do
now that I do not. Incubus, muse, sphinx, witch,
oracle and water sylph, I gave to each my crystal skull
they could wear around their neck like a prophetic locket
to remember what we were to each other once
before the moon in the corals fossilized the shipwreck
to set sail on this sea of shadows without a star to go by.
Amor vincit omnia. Maybe. But I'm more a pirate
with the eclipse of my third eye for an eyepatch
and a parrot that's teaching me to keep my mouth shut
than I am a navy even if there isn't a rudder on this lifeboat
or a bay to sail into of my own. And I'm not looking
for a northwest passage to Cathay through a periscope
that's stayed under too long to know where it's going
without a starmap. I'm not interested in exploring decay
from the inside out like some submersible in a lunar ocean.
I've sailed under the skull and crossbones all my life.
And I'm not about to strike my colours like the maples,
lay them down like the burning blades of the angels
at the gates of dying garden. I'm going to hold out
long after the irises have surrendered their rainbows
to a retinal circus without any sacred clowns or animal acts
where the judas goats train the tigers to jump
through the brindled hoops of their own screening myths of fire.
It's wise to tread cautiously among the duff and detritus of death
like a protocol of your own instinct, good spiritual manners
among the extinct so the dead don't sink into oblivion
like a garbage barge. I revere the autumnal exorcism
as much as the vernal summoning to a seance.
I'm as sincere about my farewells as I am my hellos
as I watch the wavelengths shift from blue to red,
lowering the frequencies of fountains into watersheds
as if a musician were putting his guitar back into the coffin
he carries it around in. Green bough. Dead branch. Same song
as far as I've learned to sing to myself in the dark coming on.
The snakes can tie themselves into knots and hibernate
as long as they want, and all my summer visions
can turn into hard cold facts. I've still got a dragon of serpent fire
walking my spinal cord like a high wire act
without safety nets because I've always made it
a point of balanced awareness along this dangerous coast
to sail with the wind behind me like the light of a star
a wingspan ahead of my fall. The ghost of a battle scar
that's made it this far into a wounded future
without a pyre or a lighthouse to chart the course
of my desire not to live like yesterday's flowers
strewn on the corpse of tomorrow's hearse.
poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Absolution (Element Of The Ensemble III)
As I am following your footprints in the dead of night
The fog is thickening the air and as the rain falls down
I feel your presence nearby and as I search the grounds
I see you trembling with fear lying on the ground
I walk up to you, look into your eyes
I see pain and sorrow and that you will never rise
Regretting all events that you have lived 'till this day
There's no turning back, nothing you could do nor say
The understanding of certain decisions
May sometimes be difficult
A fear which could last all eternity
I enter your mind, see the world from your eyes
I reach out, touch your soul: I close my eyes to feel
The rumbling pain that runs within you, which now cannot be healed
Our minds are correlated in space of tranformed state
Your body levitates by my hand, I read your thoughts at infinite rate.
The understanding of certain decisions
May sometimes be difficult
A fear which could last all eternity
I enter your mind, see the world from your eyes
You seek forgiveness from God and people surrounding
You've just realized the pain and sorrow you have given
Love was something you were getting, never giving
Now your soul is forever scarred and weakened
Soon, you will understand the time has come today
For you to learn from your mistakes, for you to learn the ways
Willing to see through the heart, beauty and brightness of the mind
Knowing how to use the sight, the ability to find.
The understanding of certain decisions
May sometimes be difficult
A fear which could last all eternity
I enter your mind, see the world from your eyes
Chemical sorting and pair creation
Intervention takes place, memory to ashes
The mind reborn, you seek your true purpose
It lies within you...
I feel peace within as your soul meets a new world
A world where you may step up to a higher learning
Take my hand and walk down the path of forgiveness
song performed by by Quo Vadis
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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