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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476562" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Ever Since I Became A Poet</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476562" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Ever since I became a poet <br>my whole life is an open wound <br>I've been bleeding out of <br>like a ribbon on a gift addressed to everyone.<br>Started out an astronomer<br>and then came poetry and painting. <br>And ever since, on days like this, <br>feels like I'm hanging in mid air <br>like Sri Lankans do to prophesy at New Year<br>with a great hook of a question-mark <br>through my gut. And I do. I prophecy <br>just to get a grip on the blinding pain.<br>Probably prophesy too much.<br>Wish I was talented enough to say nothing<br>and wasn't compelled to scream out like this in agony <br>like a screech owl with blood on its claws <br>and huge wise eyes that can see in the dark.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476562" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">End times. Sixty three years closer <br>to being reborn again as someone <br>I can identify with. And the stars have aged <br>a lot slower than I have. I look back. <br>I look omnidirectionally ahead like a star <br>and when I feel like a wolf, wild, free, alert and wary, <br>what a long, dangerous, dark, strange, radiant trip it's been, <br>but when I'm a salmon, in the Druidic sense of the word, <br>It seems I've been swimming upstream most of my life <br>through a fluid, shapeshifting waterclock <br>of a space-time continuum that summons me <br>like a ghost to a seance where I spiritually spawn and die.<br>Arta longa; vita brevis. All things expire <br>in the same creative medium they were born from<br>and came closest to mastering. Like childhood.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476562" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Fame was a temptation in the beginning<br>but only as an aid to intriguing women <br>with the exquisite ferocity of my ability <br>to suddenly break into stars when things were their darkest. <br>Women have always been the gates <br>to the land of enlightenment for me, <br>the window with the view that opens out <br>onto whole new vistas of God so encompassingly beautiful <br>half the time their beauty was freaked with mystic terror <br>like little threads of lightning from a passing storm <br>over the darkening hills as the stars and fireflies came out<br>and charmed me back into having <br>the courage to open my eyes again. <br>Lightning, stars, fireflies, three avatars of insight.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476562" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">My sex life has strangely paralleled my literary career. <br>I call myself a heretic. But in fact, I've always been <br>sacrilegiously sacrificial when it comes to poetry or love. <br>I let the lamb put the lion on the altar for a change. <br>It's my oxymoronic approach to God as a woman <br>in whom all opposites are reconciled in a unitive state <br>that can be more accurately approximated as not-two, better than one. <br>And I don't expect everybody to know what that means, <br>or how much pain there is behind those few moments of bliss <br>you just seem to blunder into indelibly out of the blue. <br>Karma, atma, anke, fate, synchronous happenings <br>in a charged particle field <br>in a dynamic equilibrium of reversible polarities.<br>Call it what you like, one brief kiss and you're an addict for life. <br>The muse comes your way <br>and you're overtaken by the path you're on, <br>and you realize, as you stand there gaping, <br>as a poet in the presence, you've got nothing <br>of any consequence to say until your mouth learns how to listen<br>and no one can teach you to do that better than a woman. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476562" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">So, yes, women for most of the duration and then <br>the beginning of this long spiritual journey <br>that starts in the heart with separation from someone. <br>As if the stars just threw acid in your eyes <br>and forced you to look at things another way.<br>And then you understand how even<br>a wild, single-petalled rose can open the eyes in your blood<br>and when you cry, it's haemoglobin, not tears<br>that wash the blindness out of them like an oilslick.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476562" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And reversing the spin on the eclipse, you grow to be grateful <br>to the things you either didn't know how, or were afraid to look at. <br>Sight is a kind of love, and there's no end of the seeing. <br>You can walk in darkness like a diamond in a lump of coal <br>for millions of years and never suspect <br>you've been shining all along, <br>you've been decaying into light.<br>What is the most fervent longing of the trees <br>if it isn't one day to turn themselves into the light <br>they keep reaching out to like <br>Dutch elms with six millions leaves a piece? <br>To be rooted in the very source of life they aspire to.<br>That's why so many flowers look uncannily like the stars. <br>And the Sufis say you take on the characteristics <br>of anyone you've been around longer than forty days. <br>And by the time you're as old as I am <br>you look in the mirror, and you see <br>the features of the universe that's been living you <br>for as long as you can remember, moment by moment. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476562" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Bless, curse, heal, scry, prophesy, deepen, praise, purge, <br>improve, reform, redress, delight, teach, or celebrate, <br>when I can't find any meaning in my insignificance <br>it's great to think that poetry might do all of these things, <br>but the more I write, the more I begin<br>to counter-intuitively suspect poetry's got an agenda of its own <br>you catch a glimpse of from time to time in the depths <br>and in the millions of subconscious harmonies <br>that show up spontaneously on the surface <br>in the course of your life's work that defy explanation<br>except as a mode of participatory collaborative creation <br>where you don't always know who you're working with <br>or who is working you, as the case may be, so you <br>often feel like a bit of a fraud to put your name alone <br>on the fruits your labour, as if a single tree <br>took a bow for the whole orchard <br>and the sun and the light, the earth, the rain, <br>had nothing to do with what lept from your brain <br>like the myth of the origin of Athena.<br> <br>And I hope it does some good in the world <br>like a wheelbarrow you bring to a garden.<br>I hope I've made a gift of a gift of a gift of a gift <br>though the way life is that's as hard to determine<br>as who the real giver is. And as a pragmatic mystic <br>and practising artist, with my head in the stars <br>and my feet on the ground, not really any of my business.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476562" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And speaking of that, I loathe the way poetry <br>has been heartshrunk from a noble calling <br>into a petty business card. And as for those few among many <br>who still have the courage and the clarity <br>to risk the revolutionary dangers of their sincerity, <br>it fills me with savage indignation to see <br>their imaginations chained like young trees <br>to a four by four square of permissible earth <br>surrounded by a lifeless prairie of parking lot asphalt.<br>That's how scared parking lots are of trees.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476562" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But things will change, and change again <br>because people get sick of the obvious soon enough<br>and the bling of tinfoil on the midways of life, <br>and stepping out of the blazing of the circus <br>into the darkness beyond, look up at the stars<br>and long as they have done and will always do <br>to lose themselves in the mystery <br>that's shining all around them as if <br>the light were emanating from the inside of the lanterns <br>they hold up like their hearts to the darkness.<br>And believe me, as much as I love astronomy<br>and the shape of a telescope has almost <br>as much sex appeal to me as the genius of a woman's body<br>it was poetry that taught me how much further <br>one of these little lanterns can see into the mystery <br>than the most gargantuan spaced out observatories can.<br>The seeking is always more beguiling than the finding, <br>depending, of course, on what you're looking for. <br>And losing yourself in something that absorbs you wholly <br>is still the quickest way to dust off the staleness of life <br>and polish the mirror to brighten the stars in your eyes. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476562" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Or if you're having one of those demonically possessed days<br>when it seems you keep knocking on the front doors <br>of the hives of killers bees that keep swarming you <br>with the ferocity of mass mundanities, hoping one of them <br>might turn out to be a pinata full of treats <br>at a Mexican birthday party, if you persist in risking enough.<br>Poetry, if you give it more than you even thought you had to give, <br>will give you in return, when you need them the most <br>the arms to take up against a sea of troubled dubieties, <br>and sitting down at your desk, out of breath from running, <br>empower you to give every bee and demon back its stinger <br>by giving each a name, and writing them to death<br>like a constellation of black dwarfs, as I have here<br>just to irradiate the air again with northern auroras <br>of solar flares lifting the veils to reveal <br>the intense clarity in the eyes of the mystery <br>that all things are as they are, <br>because just like atoms and quasars<br>when all is said and done<br>everything comes down to metaphors. <br>And the esoteric teachings of inspired shape-shifters, <br>whispering cosmically in the dark to themselves<br>the secret spells of black matter that landscape the light <br>with imagination, insight, and intuition<br>and without nudging a single atom<br>with the slightest notion of thought<br>bring whole new worlds to fruition<br>with every wavelength of the mystery <br>that abides within like compassion<br>shy in the shadows of love, waiting <br>for love to open the door from the inside<br>and see what it's done to the place <br>in the absence of the stranger <br>standing on his own threshold in the doorway <br>of the homelessness that throws its arms about him<br>like space, time, light, love, light and life <br>and welcomes him back like the return journey <br>of the way he left in the first place.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a></strong></div>