En.Citatepedia^®.ro

You May. You May Not Come. Maybe Tonight. Or Not

You may. You may not come. Maybe tonight. Or not.
When it's not cooking cosmic eggs, boiling heretics
in the hot oil of bubbling cauldrons, the hourglass
is sandpainting sidereal mandalas with stars
to empower the wind to blow them away,
bones of grey chalk watergilding my flesh in ash.

What did I say? What did I say that was so unorthodox
all the bells of your body were left speechless
at the sight of so many grails trashed like empties
from a car window like a litter of roadkill
along the side of the highway? Did I transit
the zenith of the burning bridge of your last loveletter,
or should I have jumped, or fell, or cannonballed in
to make a bigger splash in the blood vats of your heart?
Maybe a meteor to render your old lovers extinct?

I watch the cold windows until they begin to percolate
in an unexpected thaw of disciplined sorrows.
It's getting late. Your absence, a glacial waterclock
followed by a lot of patronymic colons about who
begat what upon whom. I don't want to meet your father.
I'd kill him on the spot. I don't want to prove
to your mother I'm going to be good to you
in ways that she was not as she soaks
the blood from the carpet like gouts
of insincere candlewax. The price you pay
for three meals a day and a creative finishing school
where you can afford the kind of problems
the poor don't make enough to imitate.

They worry about where the next meal
is coming from. You were born knowing
how far out the soup spoon was supposed
to be aligned from the begging bowl
like a shepherd moon in orbit around Neptune.
And me? I eat out of my skull on the run
whenever I'm writing poetry to the moon
in one long howl of anguished wanting.

Were the diamonds too hard? Wasn't I
bituminous enough when I entered the dark
to show you how I could shine out of
my own inner resources like two hundred million
urns of light gathered from the firepits of the stars
by the crows that keep pecking out my eyes
like jackhammers looking for the motherlode?
And when I watched you slicing the throats
of your long-necked swans like ballet dancers
and black daffodils on an angle to preserve them longer
as cut flowers on the coffee table, didn't I
make a Zen comment on the way you'd arranged them?

I've been scarred by love like a clay tablet in cuneiform
in the library of Ashurbanipal. The crow
has scratched at my flesh to show me where to bury
my dismembered body parts to guarantee
a higher yield over the ensuing light years.
The cat claw of the moon has caught my eye
more than once. Fireflies in a bird net,
I've cauterized my optic nerves on the constellations
of my own signage to keep my brain from seeing
what my heart was afraid to reveal to itself.
I was a blind prophet being led away by a child.

I could witness on the dark side of my seeing
the bird eating arachnids with two red stars for eyes
weaving their wavelengths into low frequency webs
like the bass strings of a slack guitar
to catch the fire of the morning dew in a false dawn
like Cherokee water spiders with hairy down
and scarlet stripes casting magical spells
like the geoglyph on the Nazca pampas
with Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka
in the hourglass waist of Orion trying to squeeze
its abdomen into a whalebone corset
before the Arabs changed its sex
into the belt of a less subtle Hunter
with a trophy line of scalps for wampum.

One of them mine. My eyes transfixed
by the paradigm of an eclipse being peeled back
like a black eyelid of time, or raven tresses
from the skull of the moon. I've known
the innocence of the crow when its feathers
were albino white before its failure turned sinister
as a starless night. A penury of insight
pearl diving for diamonds in a tarpit of love
that swore the new moon would last forever
like apple bloom and silver on the inside of the ore.

But sometimes the Artesian springs we plant
in the starmud of our hearts come up like black holes
and flowers of oil and what's left of the shining
is the tinfoil of a trickster shaman substituting
his hunting magic to gratify the eyes of fools
that revel in their amorous delusions and spurn
the astringencies of enlightenment that burn
like circumpolar suns at midnight illuminating
nothing but the skins we shed to let the snake
out the box like Draco, without getting bit
by the picture-music of our own motives
trying to charm the serpent fire with backbone flutes
jamming with the downed powerlines
of our badly tuned spinal cords riffing
with the cosmic spiders writing the lyrics
of our myth of origins like electrical dreamcatchers
with toxic pincers like the tuning forks of splintered stars.

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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And Should I Recall Whose Eyes

And should I recall whose eyes made the stars most beautiful,
and set the mindstream that flowed though us aflame with fireflies
a moment there and gone and come again like light
in the keyholes of the feral cats that prowled the graveyardshift
wholly to the top of the broom-swept path up Heartbreak Hill,
where the bones of the seven hanged men lay buried
in the duff of our childhood legends, a shadow and a name,
trying love on shyly like new clothes in the shadows of the pines,
where we lay down with the dead on beds of rusty compass needles,
out of sight of the windows of the town, how could I not feel,
here alone now by the Tay, thousands of miles away,
and more years later than it takes to walk a burning bridge,
waiting for the flower moon to appear above the horizon,
the waterclock in the nightbird's song of longing?

And if I were to say what it was like to be touched by her
when she was brave with hunger and my body
all loaves and fishs in the innocence of her hands
and her breasts and lips magic mushrooms without the flies
that swarmed the garbage cans in the back-alleys below,
and though it was not wise to begin a new life
on the last night of the past we were ending together,
like a bell and a cannon that had been melted down
from the same dark ore of a life we were cut out of
like a wound in a loveletter we left unsigned for one another,
because good-bye was harder to write than just to let things go,
what words could I use that weren't already
denuded of their shining like a windfall
of black dwarfs on the windowsills of time,
and the stars that night that clung to the sky
like bubbles in the evanescence of glass
or the grass to our flesh, all washed off now
as if they were grime, the quiet patina of time
gilding the dust like rainbows on the wings of flies?

And the wind asks, and the water sylphs want to know
and the wild willows are holding their breath like a veil
and the Tay is pulling a curtain of water aside in its wake
to hear about another stranger the earth swallowed
like a sacred syllable in the mouth of a snake
that envied the waterbirds their wavelengths and wings,
and though the skeletal birch and prophetic skulls
in the riverbed plead like the end of a dream
for one more lullaby in the ghost story of the moonrise,
I show them the black pearl of my heart
lustrous as hard coal to burn again in the furnace of dawn
on the dark side of the moon in partial eclipse
as I weep like a dragon for the secrets I keep
like myths of origin in the urns of things that are gone
like the irrevocable flightfeathers of the words and waterbirds
under the lost petals of fire that bloom in the eyes of the flower moon.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sometimes The Heart Buries Its Sorrow

Sometimes the heart buries its sorrow
like a bell or an hourglass beside the road
as if it came upon a dead bird it couldn't name
and returned it to the earth like unread mail.
There's no gate where I'm going, the air
will tremble a bit and that'll be it. Maybe
a firefly or two, to liven things up,
but no sign of lightning tearing its hair out.

I shall evaporate like a dream someone
couldn't remember having, and what seems
so crucially significant now shall disappear,
disperse, dissipate like smoke from of a fire
and all that will remain of this passionate burning
will be an odd fragrance among the stars
that doesn't arrest the attention of the bees.

And these things of my mother that she gave to me,
Blood, flesh, bone, breath and my love of poetry
and compassion for the world you need to write it,
deeply involved in an unrestricted love affair,
will be scattered like urns on the wind as if
my ashes had no respect for their individuality.
The waterclock ended in a desert of mirages,
not the afterlife of an embryo off to a good start.

The death of an art, the extinction of a species,
not the fall of a sparrow anyone notices,
and I'm not even saying they should if they don't
anymore than they feel the loss of a skin cell.
Some people prefer umbrellas to wild flowers.
Icons of the moon without the dragon.
A mouthful of fire to the taste of water.
Tigers in a zoo, to the dangers of an open door.
It's wrong to make love, music, poetry, colour,
compulsory, anymore than you can demand a friend.
Got to give time and space to the black swan
of a nugget of coal to realize it's a motherlode
of diamonds born out of its progressive dissolution.

Translucent effusions of insight into
a speculative nothing, a flying carpet of wavelengths
unravelling on the loom of the moon,
just because the stars have left their genes
on a helical stairwell of flypaper like a chromosome,
doesn't mean you're a replicant of eternity,
or to see the onceness of life in everything
it's becoming without consulting you
is some kind of exemption you can seek for yourself.
Enlightenment isn't a ticket to pass, it's
not to see the beauty of the chains in the bliss of delusion.
Not to make choirs out of your Maenadic desires.
When have you ever not done this, when
have you ever not realized you were the summum bonum
of your own conspicuous consumption?
But who asks you to die before you're dead
to sabotage your artistic pursuit of happiness
whether you achieve it or not? The absurdity
of the search is enough in itself to make it profound.
Enlightenment ploughs you back into the ground
you came from like grass on the moon
and as a bigger fool that I could ever hope to be
once said: if the cold doesn't go through your bones once
how can there be apricot blossoms in the spring?

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Took My Death Mask Off For You

I took my deathmask off for you
to show you the naked absence
behind the past of everything I've ever been.
Real, you said, and meant something squalid.
And I autographed your holy book
with green ink the same colour as your eyes
with a fountain pen that didn't
step into the same poem twice.
Let's be real, you said, but you meant solid,
so we pushed your single bed
over by a window full of stars
and pulled the blind down on enlightenment,
cataracts in the eye, flowers in the sky,
and made love to the picture-music of a candle,
jealous of my gold-nibbed fountain pen
trying to prove it had a voice of its own
and could bleed as easily I could over nothing.
And I remember how you liked to sing to me
with that old cat-scratched guitar
you kept in the corner like an emergency lifeboat.
And I'd listen like a lighthouse
just to bug the candle
for being so competitive
any gust of stars could blow it away in jest.
And I heard the music of shy spiders
spinning the lyrics of their silken sorrows
on the looms of their guitars like webs.
And you could tell by the way I looked at you,
I wanted you to take off your veils and dreamcatchers,
that serpentine boa of apricot orchards
feathered between your breasts, get naked again
and go swimming with me
like two dolphins on the moon
in your deepest, darkest watersheds
where you weep black pearls
like the broken rosaries of past eclipses
that portended the end of the world
for all those one-eyed lovers as they knew it
who tried to patch the wounded rose
with one of her own petals like a bicycle tire
and blew it big time on the downslope to nowhere.
And if I was autumn
with my whole future behind me
then you were spring
with your past up ahead.
Though we both knew
time was just a rumour
some snakeoil salesman
was trying to spread
like a cure-all for everything.
And there were times when we bumped hearts
like two soft rocks of coal playing with fire
I swear I saw meteroritic nano-diamonds in the sparks
anyone of which could have been the beginning
of a new religion I could have given my soul to
if I wasn't already the prophetic heretic of one of my own.
And you'd end up burning me at the stake of your guitar
for breathing life back into the dead words
that expire like caged birds
in the chimneys and lockets,
of your spiritual metaphors,
new lamps for old, new wine
for the old wine-skins of the new moon.
I never wanted to see Mary Magdalene
stoned among the asteroids
like a sacred whore defamed
by everyone else's vices
because she dances unashamedly
naked as a snake in the temple of Isis.
Besides, why make confession like graffiti
written on the concrete underside
of realistic overpasses and burning bridges
as an urgent sign of the times
even in these urban shrines of futility
where we speak in forked tongues when we pray
for things we don't even know if we want,
in pictographic hieroglyphics
for illiterates with dangerous spraybombs
that shake their tails like rattlesnakes
that don't want to be tread on when they're empty.
And for those who've mastered
the writing on the wall
as if it were their mother tongue,
the ambiguous eloquence
of these blessings and curses,
this Delphic ambivalence of Pythian oracles
split down the middle of what they meant
like the witching wand of a fire serpent
or a tuning fork looking for the G-spot
on the lunar body of a shapely guitar
trembling like a spider in an hourglass
everytime the world gets turned upside down
like moonset in the morning of a mirage.
Why crack another perfectly good mirror
just to hatch another eclipse
out of a cosmic egg
when it's just as easy
to teach people to see in the dark.
And, besides, you being the singer you were,
I didn't think a nightbird needed a voice coach
and I'm nothing, if not a man of my word
though I know it sounds
too sophisticated to the foolish,
and to those who know
way more than I care to, absurd.
But I don't trust any kind of wisdom
that takes its craziness for granted
and starts putting bars on the windows
to keep itself out of the asylum.
This is this. And this is that too.
And whether I'm looking
deeply into stars or fireflies
from either end of the telescope
at a feast of light, or the crumbs
of a dream in the corners of the eyes
of the last famine of seven lean kind,
alone with myself in the night
beauty is always an ocean of bliss
tinctured with a mild antidote of sadness
so this doesn't overwhelm that
in a delerium of epiphenomenal madness.
I don't know if you'd call it spiritual or not
but when it comes to divining the undefinable,
I know that similes share a lot more of themselves
with a world that doesn't cut itself any slack
than metaphors that insist on exacting
false identities from refugees along the road
with whom they have nothing in common
but exile and the longing
of a candle in the window
who doesn't know who it's waiting for
to write someone's name again in fire
like a fountainpen talking to birds
in a dialect of being that's older than words.
And the Sufis say you begin to take on
the characteristics of anyone
you've been around more than forty days.
And we made it a bit further than that.
You so much like the nightsea
of starless rain in me by the time we parted
and me the unpredictable spiritual weather
in the third eye of your emotional hurricane
looking for landfall with ravens and doves
in an exchange of transcontinental loveletters
with black and white feathers.

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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When The Blue Dove Turns Back

When the blue dove turns back,
exhausted by looking for things
she hoped to find,
blue blood to the dark side of the heart,
no land in sight, no blithe word,
no sprig of olive in her beak,
and the bruised sky turns black
and there’s nothing to seek
but the misdirections of the stars,
she looks for shelter
under the wing of the dragon
that takes her into his darkness
like the night takes in the moon.
Just for her he disarms
the claws on one wing and a prayer
like a dead branch to receive her blossom.
She thaws like snow in the heat
of his ancient serpent fire
and weeps like a window
for things that go on forever.
Like the homeless continuity
of her random flight plan.
He speaks to her tenderly
like silence out of the enormity
of his solitude within
as if she were standing
in the shadows of opening doors.
No lover, no assassin, no eclipse,
no starmap to anywhere,
not a sage of snake wisdom,
his yellow eyes slashed like full moons,
he says, you’ve got wings, just like me
and maybe it’s not landfall you’re looking for
not something continental
to rest upon like a mountaintop
but the wind, whichever way it blows,
wherever it goes
that is always vagrantly at home
and everywhere in touch with itself.
Just as the night sea never
severs itself from its own weather
whatever mirror it wears
with or without a facelift,
you might think you’re so far out of it
you’re flying a kite on string theory,
a high note on a stave of power lines.
But what are these if not
your own umbilical and spinal cords
attached like wavelengths and lifelines
to everything in the womb of the dark mother
who keeps on giving birth to you
from one bucket of a waterclock
to the next forever?
And when you’re lost in your own eyes,
is the night not compassionate,
does it not lay out a starmap before you
and say go whichever way you want,
follow whatever star you choose.
In an omnidirectional world of light
they’re all true north
even when you’re walking
in the shadows of your own shining.
Even when you’re trying to reach landfall
by cooking rocks in a tinfoil crack spoon
like the feminine gender of Columbus
in the Caribbean islands
when you break up
like Pangaea into continents
as if you were fracturing prophetic skulls
that didn’t take their own advice,
hoping someone might name one after you.
And I can think of a few
that could be immediately renamed after you
though you’re not the first
nor the last to discover them.
Mu and Atlantis.
But they’re not the kind of place
you want to pilot an ark to.
And if you think it’s hard now
try tugging a shipwreck up from the bottom
to see if even one of a kind survived.
There you can eat the carrion of corpses
like the white crow
Noah sent out first
to look for dry land
then cursed the bird
for feeding off the drowned
with a hoarse voice
and an eclipse of black feathers,
turning diamond back into coal
you can cook in a spoon
like forty nights of new moons
that never open their eyes
because they’re as stillborn
as the porcelain doorknob
of a cosmic egg
you can only break out of
on the inside
by letting the world
unfold your wingspan
like a loveletter to yourself
you finally decide to send back like word
of a blue dove at peace with herself
at the first sight of real land
even from the crow’s nest
you’re living in now
from hand to mouth.

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 Flesh Your Spirit Out In Starmud

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

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Lament Of The Last Train Whistle

The lament of the last train whistle
has disappeared into the distance
mournfully looking for its lost child.
October night in the woods
around an old fire pit of prophetic skulls
blowing ghosts of smoke in my face
that bring me to tears, a neolithic calendar
of all the old and new moons that have passed.
So many, so much, that used to matter
doesn't anymore. Dream figures
that shed their skins like the longer wavelengths
of watersnakes in an infra-red mindscape
of serpent fire dying like the sun
that can tell the hour by the taste of its ashes.
I throw more well-dried thresholds on the fire
like branches that used to be green with the tears
of sweeter departures and arrivals over the years.

All the light's jumped from orbitals
of the tree rings that sag like bags
under the eyes knotted like islands
in the heartwood of their xylem and phloem.
Here where the river parts like long hair
on the skull of a stone, I sit like a demon
in a sacred place, clarified, alert, and alone
as any nocturnal animal in the woods.
The chalkdust of my bones trying
to connect the stars to their constellations
snagged in the trees like the rags of spiderwebs
on the blackboard of a starmap as wide as the sky
and deep as the subconscious of the Burgess Shale.

It's not a betrayal to let go of your faith
when you had none in the first place
and you don't need a parachute on the edge of space
to plunge from paradise, or a weather balloon
of a bad Christian poet to shepherd Dante
like a moon out of hell. Be yourself,
especially when nobody's watching
except that same drone in the sky
that occasionally flashes a flake of silver off
its stone cold third eye to flint your awareness
that it's still there in the cosmic background
like a witness to your dreams and schemes
for a luxuriously appointed life of enlightenment.

Be yourself. The direct copulative imperative
that has supplanted the light as the first word
out of the mouth of creation. Be yourself.
And then let there be light by the side of a good fire
to let you see who that is as acutely
as you can see in the dark who that is not.

The migration of the Canada geese might seem
a broken rosary of new moons calling out
the names of God to you, and one unknown,
or silhouetted against the moon they might
suggest the afterbirth attached to a cut umbilical cord
and your heart might feel reborn somewhere
in the autumn of your life, a child of the fire,
a flower in the full bloom of its solitude
dancing with its own mercurial apparition
on the waters of life in the mindstream
always out of season enough to lag behind
so it can tell the time by the widening gaps in its passage
as it's waiting for the night to catch up to its own shining
like a thief of fire unchained from the rock
that broke the glass window of its transfixed seeing
with a meteor in the hands of an enlightened delinquent.

Or you might read the falling leaves as occult lifelines
on a Tarot deck of overlapping lifespans
like the scales of a dragon playing solitaire
beside the small inferno of a signal fire to the stars,
to let them know you're coming faster
than the time it takes for a thought to make it
all the way to death and back to birth again
as if you were pinging your emotions
like stray wavelengths from the oceans of your awareness
off the horns of the moon the way
you used to skip rocks out over the sea as a boy
to see how long they would keep on going
like a waterclock of stone before they sank
like the flying fish of the hard, cold facts of life back into
the numinous depths of your collective unknowing
where the stars aren't fixed to anything that isn't
flowing along with them like the wind on the mindstream
or a small fire catching its breath in the silence and the solitude
of so much radiance, before it's on its way again for good.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Lighting It Up And Blowing It Out

Lighting it up and blowing it out
I try to make my way through the dark
by beginning at the end
as if the coming and the going
were the same door
or good-bye were the first thing
you would say to a friend.
I approach things like a night stream
as if my death were already achieved
and behind me.
And all the atoms of my being
dancing like frenzied gnats
in the sunset glow of a last eye-beam
are certifiably primordial
and any one of them
when they lose it in the light
could begin a world.
And what can you say more of a life
that dreams of what it is
than it's the taste of the same wine
in many different cups?
And as any fox knows
the grape is always sweetest
when you can taste it with your eyes.
Though why foxes eat grapes is anyone's guess
but life makes itself up as it goes
like music in a fish's earlobes.
It feathers its themes in fire and light
and goes up in smoke
like the ghost of a tree
looking for habitable planets among the stars.
New wounds with innocent root-room for old scars.
Chalking the cue to bank the long shot
you're trying to spin off into
the deep, dark pockets
of your game-winning afterlife.
And I don't believe in much anymore
though that hasn't stopped me from crying
like a slow window trying to keep
the stars from leaking out of me
as if there were a black hole
somewhere in my heart
waiting for an iris to make it an eye
whose seeing might be a new way of healing
what can't be healed.
Once here. Here forever.
But whether we're the eternal children of forever
or just another breath on the night air
that doesn't even know we live,
even death is just another way of killing time here.
When everywhere's the center of everything else,
the centre holds,
things don't fall apart.
They disappear.
And that's the mystic art
of knowing how to make the most out of existence
by offering no resistance
to the rocks in your own mindstream
that part the waters like the thoughts
of an exile in the promised land
who can't go back the way she came.
The river can't step into the same you twice.
And in every direction
your eyes have ever burned like stars
you can see the dark jewel of your own life
from the inside
before it breaks into light.
Sometimes I'm the lonely sign
on the only path to nowhere
and others I'm positively amniotic
with the schools of my blue lucidity
the albino dolphins of the moon leap through
without a chance of changing their colour.
A flower of prophetic blood bleaches my skull.
I swallow the snakefire of my last eclipse
like a lump of coal
I'm trying to turn into a diamond
that doesn't burn
and never sloughs its skin.
Reality isn't a religion or a science,
or the back and front of a mirror
that doesn't know whose eyes its looking through.
Religion: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Science: how many pins can dance on the head of an angel?
Totem poles on a telephone booth where no one ever picks up.
Voodoo dolls that hex the cause of their effects.
The apple bloom on the tree of knowledge
lets go of its flightless wings
and follows the wind
like the eyelids of unfeathered angels
who opened their eyes like flawless fruit
as they fell toward paradise
without a parachute of smokey virtue
or the scale of a snake for a vice.
Emergence into the open
like a hidden secret revealed
is the engine of evolution
that empowers the dark matter
of this incorporeal starmud
to arise like the high note of a bird
that's flown beyond the night in its voice
like light beyond its myth of origin.
And the peduncle is lost in the ensuing phylum
as a madman is lost in the scream
that woke up the asylum,
or a god is lost in his own creation.
And the mountains listen
to the holy voices
in the valleys of their shadows
they deepen as they arise
like the guests of an echoless calling
to greet the unknown host.
It's what the moon feels
when she fondles her locket of water
and memories pull at her heartstrings
like tides on earth
and music is the way she recalls
the sirens that used to sing
like the brides of empty lifeboats
that prayed like smashed guitars
for the night to sow the seedless sea with stars.
And in every fish that swims through fire
like the sacred response of life
to the longing in its own desire
she knows they got their wish.
Fireflies in the ashes of the phoenix tree.
And the eggs of cosmic words
like serpents in a bird's nest
learning to fly like dragons
that have just swallowed the moon.
And it's one thing to pull the sword from the stone
but it's a greater power than magic and proof
with no urge to rule
that summons the butterfly from its cocoon
by giving the fool who inches toward the truth
along the green branch toward the apple-bloom
that already tastes like the forbidden fruit
of some radical insight
the whole orchard in a pair of wings
and more than enough night and light on its palette
to start a revolution in seeing among the flowers
who still labour in the chains of their roots
to turn their earthbound lucidities into stars
who might look back for a change
with eyes that have gathered like water out of the shining
and taste the light in the honey
that kissed their eyelids into gold
long before the night was old
and it wasn't enough just to see them.
When you opened your eyes
in the burning clarity of your lone vision
before this matrix of space and time
gave birth to the world
you were free to be whatever you could see.
That's when the light first spoke to you
in the mother-tongue of your seeing
and your voice broke
like a secret name in the mirror
that didn't know who you were
and the moon on nightwater
the thief at the window
your breath like stars on the cold, night air
summoned the whole of being
in every particulate shard
and radiant plinth of the mirror
to drive your shining into the shadows
so myriad things can appear as they are.
Many eyes open. Night. An eclipse. One star.
And the darkness an anti-romantic
in love with the moon from afar.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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If Only I Could Remember Things For Awhile

If only I could remember things for awhile
as they were before they changed. Savour them.
Let the flavour of the jewel
that's been ripening in my voice
wash through my mouth
like the mystic blaze of a star sapphire
and every word I say be a firefly of insight
that can shed some light on dark matter.

Would that my tears fell fruitfully enough
to feed the world, that one dropp of my blood
after years of preparing the potion, were enough
to immunize a whole planet from affliction.
And what marvels would my eyes not delight
in showing anyone, if they could astonish the blind
like an orbiting telescope that's just had
its cataracts removed
like the reflection of the moon peeled
like an albino eclipse off the black mirror of the lake
only to discover that all this time they groped through the dark
like star-nosed moles, it was their own face that got in the way
of what was shining. If only my hands
knew how to build like the birds
and my bones were strong crossbeams and rafters,
what palaces of light and water and air
would my heart not offer to the homeless
like the growth rings of a maple tree
that threw them the keys like winged samara
and said, move in, its yours. It's built on bedrock
not the quicksand cornerstone of a slum lord.

For the lonely sitting with their cats and their elbows
in half-opened windows, observing
the pigeons and the stars for memorable events,
I would break this long fast of my solitude
like black Slavic peasant bread with strangers
who sat above the salt at the table
as my honoured guests, and ask them, eye to eye,
heart to heart, all ears, as if I were a radio telescope
listening like Seti, if they've heard any news back yet
from Bellatrix or Rigel, and which
of Jupiter's shepherd moons is hiding
a secret affair with life that everyone's dying to know.

It's heart-breaking that we can't all bring our tears to bear
into one cloud weeping over a drought like a dry creekbed
where we're all hibernating in our own starmud
like toads and frogs waiting for flashfloods of the next rain
to underwhelm us like gravestones in a makeshift cemetery.
What would the world be like if we could
walk up a long country road at night far from ourselves
and not have to ask the roadkill for directions in life?
As if we were sure enough where we were going
to risk being followed by the lost like a starcluster of fireflies
within the compass of everyone's bearings, not
out there somewhere like the ghost of a spaced-out lighthouse
but like the porchlight of nearby farm on a summer night
that draws living things out of the dark like the full moon to it,
even if it just be gnats in the air, bats, or Luna moths,
what a seance of life we could be to each other
as if we left the screen door unlatched
for any lunatic of the light on the road this late at night
who might wander in like the seeds of new themes on the wind
to enrich the bright vacancy of our dark abundance
with a starmap to where our buried treasure lies hidden
like diamonds in the ore of the hearthstones of our hearts.

If I could take the whole of my darkness
and enchant its snakepits into the wavelengths
of the light I would have emanate out of me
like the rainbow body of a Tibetan rinpoche
entrusted with the wisdom of the Himalayas
to seek a low place among the stars like a sea
that all things flow down into like the shining images
we retain of ourselves like the reverberations
of experienced luminaries echoing
like seasoned birds to each other
in the valleys and black holes of tears and death below.

Sacred syllables of immortal butterflies
in the orchards of morning and moonrise.
I would shine down upon the abyss of the lovers
like a water star from the bottom up
of all the burning bridges they have yet to cross
like Aldebaran at zenith, or Cygnus at nadir,
to get them to the other side
of what binds them to each other
like water and air, light, earth and fire,
and each moment of my life, every step
I risked anew, I would become the way
that's never taken itself before this deep into the mystery
of what it means to be alive and everywhere
be endangered by the beauty of our own awareness.

Instead of breathing for the dead as long as I can
underwater on the moon, I would invite them
to make a new birthmark in new medium
that calls them back from the night like light
from the scattered ashes of the empty urn of a star
coming together again in a gravitational womb
of their own remains, where everyone achieves
the all consuming illumination of their endless afterlives
by opening the koan of a single flower
in the light of their darkest hour of perennial insight.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I'm Having An Unrequited Love Affair With Myself

I'M HAVING AN UNREQUITED LOVE AFFAIR WITH MYSELF

I'm having an unrequited love affair with myself.
It's surrealistically ironic and spiritually annihilating
at the same time, and I can say from personal experience
black holes have a profound sense of humour.
The waterlilies look up at the stars and wonder
if they could shine like that if they ever dried out.
Fire and water. The serpent fire of my electrical potential
jumps the gap like a spinal cord, a bridge is made.
Spiders weave enlightened filaments in a light bulb
like webs of neuronic wiring into dream catchers
and empowering mandalas. I have ignition.
Billions of eyes light up in the dark like fireflies.

I always thought if I really wanted to do the world some good,
I'd lead it away from myself. My alter-ego
shines like a demon in a dark light whose intelligence
is intent on ruining my life compassionately
out of a begrudging respect for sacred rodeo clowns
with red geraniums sticking out of their straw sun hats
like pathetic solar flares of blood trying to wave a red flag
to draw the bullshit off a Pacific mystic Zen cowboy
about to be gored by a horn of the moon in her crone phase.

All the women I've ever loved, lived, left and will live with
on these thresholds of the sublime and the ridiculous
like a seance that can see a future in calling things back from time,
have come to me in an aura of dark energy
like a poem in a dream expanding into space.

Or you could see Ophelia under her deathmask
drowning in wounded flowers. Two witches,
an apostate madonna, one ferocious priestess
from the dark side of the moon, one incubus,
one lamia, a Medusa, a delusional gold-digger
who kept working me like a motherlode
although I told her from the first all you're going to find here
is the slag of meteoric ore that's been mined out.
The last thing I heard her say when I left her
singing like a canary in the belly of an anaconda,
as I climbed out of the grave she was digging for both of us,
was, I thought you were rich. No, I replied,
a little taken aback at my innocence at this late date,
I just gave you everything I had
because I thought it would make you happy
if I gave you what you asked. Who else
should I have given it too if not you? Good-bye,
with blessings on your house and head,
that erotically upgraded body of yours
and all your excellent possessions.
I'm going to sleep with a bridge tonight
that knows there's two sides to every river
holding hands secretly under the mindstream
and the bird can't fly when it's a lapwing
trying to lure danger away from its cosmic eggs
and all the other wing's doing is flapping its lips.
And one Female Principle of the World
that needed me to help her incarnate in bed.

Muses all. Eclipses and full moons alike.
Eras of my life. Legends of my genome.
Each a different planet with a physics of her own.
And me the mere scaffolding of bones,
the passionate snakes and ladders
they climbed up on to paint their picture-music
on the ceiling of esoteric pantheons
where the goddess is always the pearl, black or white,
and when I know what's best for me,
I'm the big-mouthed lunar oyster shell
gaping at the moonrise in desire and wonder
dying to say what leaves me more speechless than silence.

Never knew a woman who wasn't a sky higher
than my wingspan, a sea deeper than my wisdom
despite the oceanic commotion on the surface.
I was always a continental ledge shy of their depths,
and even though I knew how to swim my way
through the darkest diamonds as easily as I did the night,
I've always considered it spiritual bad manners
and an abuse of grace, if I've paused to listen
to a mermaid singing to me, and I haven't drowned
in applause for her as soon as the song is over.
If you're not willing to die for the picture-music
you're just another flatlining event horizon
looking for a lifeboat like a whole note with a tin ear
that can't hear you singing like the fog horn
of a dinosaur mired in a tarpit like a keyboard of bones.

You don't ask a goddess to be a sacrifice.
Your heart gouged out like an organ donor to the moon
you lay it while it's still beating like a bleeding ruby
on her temple stairs and by that she'll know
you were a real king of the waxing year
and eat it like the forbidden fruit of enlightenment
when the jewel is in the lotus like a dragonfly
in a waterlily, and she smears your blood like lipstick
on the petals of a rose that worked witchcraft
with the flavours of life and love she left in my mouth.

Most of the time there's no interrogative scorpion
of bitterness up my sleeve of stinging nettles,
nor in her shoe when I put her crystal slipper back on,
having just removed a splinter of glass from the paw of a lion
I hope will remember my kindness if we're ever
in the Colosseum together as audience to the act
instead of predator and prey of the fact
that the asters at the end of summer that we cherish most
are adorned by time in a romantic rite of passage
and then apotheosized as constellations of the autumn
approaching our lingering ghosts like a seance
of the fruits of the earth that all fell in their own good time
singularly, or a windfall in the night, sweetened by our ordeals
as if our hearts had always been bears in a beehive
of rapture and loss and paper wasps
getting mystically hammered on our tears
like the lightyears of life that have aged like stars in our eyes.

I can still taste the mystery of the dark mirrors
we held up to each other like synchronous swimmers,
that deepened so many insights into the strangeness of human nature,
even long after we entered the abyss of the future
like empty urns, I swear, there's still a dragon in my ashes
that rises up like a pillar of fire or a solar flare,
an eternal flame, a sudden efflorescence of stars,
and makes a deep, sweeping bow to the women I have loved
who left me these gloves of moonlight
glowing on my windowsill when I'm alone in the dark.

And I can hear the Canada geese heading south,
and I remember how vast and eyeless the sky is
when exhausted lovers part like frayed mindstreams
trying to flow past the sacred junction where two rivers meet
without realizing the mingling of their waters is indelible
and it's hard to find reverse in a universe
that just keeps on going the same way
in this time and place, this now and here
the same path of thorns and rose petals
that everyone walks like the wind in love,
leads everywhere like fireflies trying to read a starmap
from the past, that's left its future far behind
trying to catch up to what it just let go of
like an almagest of prophetic zodiacs to come
longing for the Beast Mistress of the animal kingdom
to make them jump through their burning hoops again
like moondogs or the black haloes of comets
that keeping falling through the coronas of the sun,
or a dragon dancing in the ripples of the rain
after it's just swallowed the moon like the cosmic glain.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Weary Of The World Tonight

Weary of the world tonight. Can't stand the lies.
Some drunk loud-mouth out on the street
wants all the girls to know he's there,
My noise is bigger than your noise.
Someone playing a guitar badly in a doorway.
A homeless cat cries, lets out a howl
of torment as if its sinews were being keyed
as tight as guitar strings about to snap.
Out of the window that hasn't said anything yet:
you touch that cat again, slugger,
and I'll be right down with an axe
to give you a gender change. He looks up
startled. But all bullies are cowards
trying to deny it to themselves
while wearing their sister's underpants.

The cat makes a quick getaway
through a dark heritage alleyway.

Supercharged like a fire hydrant full of blood
throbbing through my temples, and demons
I haven't seen in years smiling darkly in the mirrors
my shadow always regretted like left-handed virtues
that got the job done. Demonic compassion,
colder than intelligence, with a deep
poetic sense of of infernal irony
whereas a muse ago in this specious present
I was longing for a small hobby farm
on the dark side of the moon, now
I'm a dragon eating waterlilies down
by the banks of my mindstream
quietly letting go of itself
like an unmoored lifeboat full of emptiness
drifting no where in particular I want to be
except here where I can shed my humanity for awhile
among the living and the dead
who don't care what I am and am not
as long as I'm not a threat to them.

Darkness, my solace, moon, my longing,
Star, warmer than any fire I've ever
sat around to exorcise my ghosts,
you, who've danced like my third eye
with the other two still chained to their irises,
the poetic lucidity that mentored me
in the ways of light and taught me
the creative rapture of the fish
that still swam like flashs of insight
to the surface of my oceanic tears,
I don't know how many light years
either of us have yet to shine or cry over,
but tonight, come down from your unindictable heights
and sit with me like the intimate stranger of a candle
in my eyes, in my soul, in my blood,
be the small flame that trembles in my breath for awhile,
be the sole illumination of my spirit for awhile,
ease my bodymind with the elixir of your radiance
emanating from the inside, and let me
be born again of that fire that burns within me,
purge my starmud of these urns and bones and black dwarfs
that weigh me down like disappointed bells
and feisty mastodons in the tarpits of my heart
that sink deeper the more they struggle to get out.

And I don't even care if you're the last firefly
to transcend my cosmic solitude like a wavelength
of the transmorphic singularity at the beginning of time
that woke the valley up with the roar of a dragon
in that elemental morning of mad genius
that's be the dawn of every moment ever since
in this chiliocosm of energies and forms
flashing out of the mystery of the questions we ask
about the inconceivability of being here to ask them.

No purpose. No meaning. Except the one
we all live vaguely as ourselves like a nebularity
out of which we might precipitate stars
of a different order of shining beyond what we can see.
Sit with me awhile as if we both had the same nature.
And you can look at the world and me through my eyes
and I'll look at you through yours as if I were seeing you
from the inside out, and there were ashes in my heartwood
even before I began to burn, as in yours,
there were the urns of heavy elements even
before they were born of their own afterlife.

Be that moment within me when time breaks into light
and even the shadows, like sunspots, shine
in their own right, and nothing is disturbed,
not even the silence that is intensified when the fish jump
or a dog is barking hills away at what approaches
out of the dark, and the waterbirds in their onceness
might seem to fly away, but have been here from the start.
Fill my life with the unimaginable splendour
of all those nights you've looked down upon the earth
and witnessed the horror and the wildflowers
in the same breath on a cold windowpane in winter
etching the light like an artist with an eye for life
or the praying mantis of a small telescope in the summer
its legs spread like a doe about to drink from her own reflection
or one half of a collapsed bridge to the other side
of everywhere at once. I don't ask for bliss or enlightenment.
Just show me how you make the shadows luminous again.
Even on a starless night, how to mourn like the eyeless rain
even as it renews the leaves and roots of the constellations
of the wild asters with their violet plinths and yellow suns
burning fiercely as a distant relation of your myriad myths of origin.

Do that for me and I'll show you how to intensify
the darkness into a diamond chrysalis of transformation
like a deeper mystic bliss in life, enhanced by the ores of pain,
as your light is by the night, or the flying stickshifts
of the dragonflies put the waterlilies in park for the night
as if they'd just got out of a car by the side of an unknown road,
not to find out where they are, but just
to gape up at the stars in the midst of decay
and let the wonder of it all heal me as it always has
by showing me how to make a cradle out of a grave
or the long, slow art of a human out of a wounded heart.

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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These Days, This Late At Night

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

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

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

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

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

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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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Dancing With An Old Man Under The Moon

Dancing with an old man under the moon
with nothing but your tattoos on,
as it rose over the treeline like a mushroom
and as beauty is to wisdom,
the blossom of your fire
to the smoke of stacked firewood
waiting to be immolated in the Bonfire of the Vanities
like an library of fingerprints on paper
just to prove that we were here once
long before this autumn made a ghost of us
and we could feel more naked with our clothes on
than we ever have done with them off.

Junkies hitting up in a snakepit of desire,
the Burmese python a heroin addict in a swamp,
the high-wire act of the rose in the circus,
the aerial acrobatics of our noblest emotions
swinging through the unimpeachable air
on a one-handed trapeze that was the axis mundi
of the world in the aberrant orbit
of a lightning struck weathervane.

Your body, a guitar; your soul, an inflammable violin,
when I wasn't burning bridges with you
like connections we didn't want to make
we were going for long firewalks among the stars
hand in hand like a couple that grew up
in the same neighbourhood that paid no attention
to whether they went out into the world and made good.
I was improbably inclined
and you were desperately uncertain
and we kept the little that was chaste between us
bucolic with shepherd moons
and major and minor dogs trying to pasture a rabbit.

Some women are beautiful like moonlit gazelles
and Greek vases are, and you stand back silently
as you would before any masterpiece of classical form
cooly and contemplatively as if you were musing
in your amazement on a first magnitude star
it would be an aesthetic desecration to touch
with anything as unshapely as a human in love.
But you knew how to swing your hips like an hourglass
and I've always been happy to be suckered by time
into filling in on the night shift for a sacred clown
who had to meet a dead line, finishing a cartoon
of the constellations he drew for a newspaper
like an out of date starmap that had to cut back on its print run.

You came with doves, I saw them, with plaster casts
on their broken wings, deadly nightshade, black orchids
that had once been the shadows of beauty queens,
and the fragrance of big pheromones charging
the summer night in your eyes with an aura of urgency
you kept hid under the eyelids of your innocence
and I could never tell whether you were the salvage
of the witch that was drowned in a trial by ordeal
or the one that showed everyone how easy it was
to walk on water when you had to save yourself.
Intrigued by the dawn of your smile, by midnight,
I was ready to sacrifice myself to the cult of it
like a Druid with a lunar sickle to the apple-bloom
of a tree alphabet deranged by the dissociated sensibilities
of an occult muse just coming out of eclipse.

I was making catalogues of the stars
that lay like ashes in my eyes when you suddenly flared up
like the saline spirit of a green flame burning in all my firepits
that began to feel they had the vision of a young dragon again
to see such foxfire blooming in the eye-sockets of its urns,
after the dark rain and fire storms, the excruciating pain
of living a life of coal predicated upon the possibility of diamonds,
the transmutation of the low into a union with the high
like a snake with wings that could ride, by God, it could ride
its own mystic wavelengths like a plutonic alloy
of the early Bronze Age just as the heroes were getting ready
to cut the umbilical cords with their hysterical, Medusan mothers.

Gratitude? Yes. You braved the taboo of the wizard
like a night bird on my windowsill, like a star
through the bars of my isolation cell
in a covert observatory buried underground
like a radical theater in a dead planetarium
staging doomsday scenarios for an unenlightened think tank
that never turned the light around on themselves
to discover that their third eye isn't the lens of a telescope.

And maybe you were the last hurrah of my flesh and bones
but, baby, you didn't leave anything elegaic in my blood
to prove it and I think it came as no less of a surprise to you
as it did to me, beyond the shadow of the searchlight of our doubt,
love had removed the black spot from my heart
like a planet in transit across a Venutian sun
and put it on your cheek like a beauty mark
in the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Beneficent
to tempt Hafiz into offering Samarkand
to a young slave girl if she would only take his hand
among the rose bushes on the banks of the Ruknabad
even if it meant he had to account to the khan
for what he squandered like gardens on the moon.

Born with wings on the heels of my cowboy boots
instead of spurs, who so club-footed
or cloven-hoofed and sodden
as camels in a B.C. gold rush
as to dance with you in sensible shoes?

Your hair was autumn. Your eyes were spring.
I lived for awhile, o who could know how to thank you,
for six months like a supernova in love with a black hole
at the vernal equinox in the thirteenth house
of the zodiac I still consult like a starmap of your tattoos
when I'm out walking in the woods alone
with the full moon that hasn't paled them in its light
even after all these years, still dancing with you in the night,
an old man circumambulating the fires of a dark bliss
by himself, certain he knows who he's dancing with and for.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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There's Nothing Cozy About Real Beauty

There’s nothing cozy about real beauty.
That’s why it scares you to death
when you’re around it. You sense
that it disdains to kill you
simply because it knows it can
but that only makes you beg for the knife
even more, even deeper, until
you’ve suffered more death
than you ever knew there was to suffer.
It’s the same with the truth. The truth
isn’t the act of a well-meaning
coffee-table sentiment,
a hundred dollar book
of recycled paper
to help save the Caribou,
an a chequered impressionist table-cloth
with compositionally balanced butter-knives
that have never tasted blood in their lives.
If you can’t hear the shriek
of the red-tailed hawk as it plunges
toward a mating pair of killdeer
executing an aerial ballet in May
that would make you cry it’s so beautiful,
you can’t hear the hummingbirds
at the holly hocks either
even if you know sign language.
And no more than the truth, poetry
isn’t a mirror you hold up to nature
with preconceived notions of what
you want to see reflected there.
In hunting season around here
the truth can bleed Bambi upside down
from the bough of a willow
that let’s its golden tresses down
all the way to the ground
until its tips are dyed in blood.
The truth can tear the heart of a wolf out
and eat it raw in front
of a classroom of schoolchildren
while it’s still beating.
Go ask any child army.
Go ask any street kid in Ottawa
or any bushwhacked adolescent in Lanark.
You asked me to read your poems
without holding anything back from you
and I have and I won’t.
You keep a tidy house
on the right side of the tracks
of a zodiac with astro-turf lawns.
And I see all your candles
have been dipped in scented wax
and write right-handed
with glowing nibs on the reverent air
and there’s a stick of sandalwood incense
protruding from a buddha’s belly-button
that makes me wonder
whether he’s committing hiri kiri
or lowering his lance at a joust
to let a lady tie a ribbon to it
as you have most of these poems
to designate them your champions.
You’ve bomb-proofed your church so well
with so many lesser lights
in cages and black outs there’s no chance
you’ll ever be struck by a bolt of inspiration.
The lightning doesn’t send messages
like sweetgrass in the beaks of doves.
You sip from the muses like bottled water
from the tears of crystal skulls.
But you haven’t yet learned how
to swallow their watersheds on the moon
or drink blood from the skull of your own
in a single gulp for fear
they’ve been contaminated by fracking.
Flying fish in a sea of shadows
that’s always at full tide
but you never reveal
the constellations of dead starfish
that reek to high heaven
like the stink of enlightenment on the bottom
when the tide bleeds out
like a white-tailed doe.
Happy lifeboats moored safely in port
as if there were nothing to risk or rescue
but a new paint job
as a storm front moves in
like a curtain call of judgmental grey.
All your feral cats have been fixed
and the darkness has no claws or fangs,
and that wilderness that used to howl
in an agony of sex and longing
under your windowsill of potted herbs
all unnerving night long
now purrs impotently in your lap.
You strew your path with rose-petals
but when have you ever walked barefoot
on toxic thorns or the plinths and eyelashes
of the splintered chandeliers of the stars?
You cut the polar ice-caps off
the extremes of a hard-boiled planet
and only eat the temperate zones
you can scoop out with a silver spoon
like the front left parietal lobe
of Humpty Dumpty’s sunny brain.
Blackholes do more to enhance
the radiance of stars and fireflies,
ignite the fire of dragons
on the other side of a wormhole hourglass
into the next coincidence
of a harmoniously contradictory world
than all those sunbeams
you try to keep on
like night lights in a morgue
because you’re afraid to sleep with the dead
and they don’t want to wake up without you.
And I’m not saying
you need to go out and mess up,
trample on your own garden,
turn Taurus loose
in the china shop of the Pleiades.
No one can go out and think their way
into an experience they haven’t had yet.
They merely experience their own thought.
Just another poetry book
having sex with itself
in the hopes of winning an award
to make it feel fulfilled enough
it can take what’s real for granted.
But even Rimbaud who
dissociated his sensibilities rationally
and then killed a man with a stone
on a construction site in Cyprus
discovered how dangerous it is
to broach the spontaneous deliberately.
As for me, I’ve learned
to delight in the despair
of my own crazy wisdom.
As for you, you might start
by turning the light and around
and looking into the darkness within you
not as a smudge on the reputation of your lilies
but as a chunk of coal
that didn’t let your diamonds down.
A suggestion I suggest you ignore
if you’ve understood anything I’ve said
about the nature of poetry
that makes any petty sense at all to you.
And the next time you
you run into your own clarity
like Galileo trying to show you
through his telescope
there are sunspots in your field of view
like bruises on a banana
and the moon is pock-marked
by one too many facelifts,
don’t try to paint the lens
as if you were airbrushing
the imperfections out of your own eyes
just realize how important it is
to open them from the inside out.
And as for those little black ants,
that keep inciting a riot of words
you’ve got no crowd control over
you keep setting honey-traps for,
to keep them from running all over
the planetary orb
of your moonlit peony in bud
like a chaos of minutes
looking for a fixed place
on a spherical waterclock
as if they were all
running out on time simultaneously.
Trust me, or don’t, they’ll let you know
when the sun shines at midnight
and your hour’s come round to bloom.
Meteors cry like diamonds
for the species they make a big impact upon.
And volcanoes eventually
weep their way into islands
that will be seeded by birds and castaways.
The eye of the rose
looks into the secret heart of the worm
and sees the wings of tearful loveletters
being born like butterflies in the rain.
And then the sun appears
and dries them out
like laundry on the line.
Or the negative of an eclipse
hung up in a dark room
like a flypaper map of the stars
in an alternative universe
on the other side of your eyes
that hasn’t come up with a name,
a fixed place, or a myth of origins for you yet
until you’ve passed
like the tiny planet of a firefly
through the gravitational eyes
of a constellation of black holes
without going out
like a flashlight you keep shining
nervously into the dark doorway
of a dragon’s mouth when you write
to see what was making the noise
like the universal cosmic hiss
of a flamethrower in a snakepit
of oracular wavelengths
that keeps you from going
downstairs to find out.
As a Zen master once said.
The stone is lustrous
but there’s nothing inside.
The ore is different
but from it comes gold.
And as any poet knows
who’s ever been inspired
you polish gold in fire.
You don’t write white noise
to block the darkness out
as if you were afraid
of things that go bump in the night.
Don’t fall like a snowflake on a furnace
then try to sip your tears like spit
from its prophetic mouth when you melt.
Be a star, be a Chinese lantern,
be a fire-kite of burning insight.
Light upon light means
the darkness shines as well
on the inside as it does without
whether you see it or not.
The moonrise of an emotion
follows the sunset of a thought.
Two tides of the same ocean,
the highs and the lows
the crest and the trough
of the same wavelength we’re all on.
And the mountain you’re trying to climb
is only as high and white
as the valley is deep and dark.
Not two is the furthest thing
you can say in a universe that isn’t a lie.
There’s a lot of shadowless noon
in your impeccable poetry
but where’s the starless midnight
on the other side of of your eyes?
Don’t orphan your first born
to legitimize your poems
like a forged birth certificate
you hope everyone will recognize
as your rightful place
in a table of contents
with the good taste of a menu.
A suggestion I suggest you ignore
if you’ve understood,
deeply understood
anything I’ve said
about the nature of poetry
that makes any petty sense at all to you.
And I don’t say this to be kind or cruel.
You know how
to harvest the full moon
like a sparrow
the gleanings of the light,
twelve grain whole wheat bread,
but you don’t know how to sow stars
on the dark side of an eclipse
that will sprout and bloom,
a phoenix feathered in wild fire
that will catch on and spread
like life itself
like the syntaretic spark
of the timeless with the fruitless dead.
Out of the dark abundance
of watersheds and roots,
the phoenix energy of your cells,
the bright vacancy of the full moon,
a blossom on a dead branch,
the new moon of a crow in autumn
on a green bough of night birds
that are never at a loss for words
when the truth and the beauty
of the light coming out of the darkness
leaves them as speechless
as a starmap of fireflies
where the constellations have no names,
going up in flames.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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I Woke Up Saying Your Name

I woke up saying your name
but in the course of the day forgot.
I should have forgiven you sooner
but my tongue was a noose and a knot.
I should have let you fool my eyes
but not my heart. No Grecian urn
but just the same
I loved the shapely vase of your body
and the fact that my ashes weren’t buried in it.
But those bouquets of angry snakes
you kept trying to arrange
into a Zen garden in Kyoto
or a hair do in Mycenean Greece
kept me looking for an antidote for years
to all those estranged wavelengths
of a gamma ray burst
I stood like a nuclear meltdown in the way of,
though I poured my blood out like heavy water
to get you to stop and cool down.
What it is is what it is only
if you don’t factor in what it’s not.
Otherwise, in the bigger picture,
what it is is just as much what it’s not.
And who can assess
what didn’t go down between us?
I’m sitting on a cold rock down by the Tay River
freezing my proverbials off
because I like being alone with the stars
at three in the morning
because they don’t ask for an explanation
about why I’m up so late
so many light years from home.
And they don’t ask me to translate my scars,
the dead word into the living,
back into wounds
they couldn’t relate to anyway.
And I don’t need to tell them
if you’re going to open yourself up to someone,
if you’re going to bloom, if
you’re going to shine
a rose, a star,
you’re bound to taste your own thorns
or the splinters of broken chandeliers
on your tongue, or a dog
with porcupine quills in its mouth,
howling at the dark side of the moon
as the greater of two faith healers.
Though neither the stars nor I
are into comparative mortality.
And as I approach death and love aimlessly
looking at the stars timelessly alone
I don’t bemoan my brevity anymore
and they don’t flash their eternity in my face.
There’s just stars and eyes for awhile
and both of us agree
death and eternity are none of our business.
There’s just this little bit of heat and light
that flares like a matchbook for a minute
and then goes out
like a holybook, a firefly,
a poem or a flower
burning in its own ashes, smothered
in its own smoke like a pillow
over a dream in a skull
that effaced itself like stars
packed into a snowman that thaws
according to cosmic laws
not meant for our eyes only.
And God, the Zeitgeist,
the Universal Id knows,
how we’ve both tried
to enlighten these lumps of coal,
these sorry excuses for eyes
into diamonds that flow
with love and compassion.
How we have laboured like Sisyphus
to haul what’s deep underground,
the dark ore within us,
up into mountains of light
only to watch it run down again
rivers and rain
into the great night seas beyond
like a heart-mind continuum.
A leaf and a starmap on a lifestream.
We have advanced into our retrogression
like everything else in the universe,
big heavy methane planets
with shepherd moons
that cast their shadows
like beauty spots on Saturn,
and our axes toppled like Neptune’s.

poem by Patrick White
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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