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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>God, I Hurt Sometimes For Reasons I Can Only Guess</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">for Sally</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">God, I hurt sometimes for reasons I can only guess.<br>Don't know what it is, too much love, too little, <br>but it feels like I'm giving birth to fog, <br>or my heart is standing in the doorway <br>of an abandoned chrysalis asking if <br>we could do it all a little differently this time, <br>and ingather like the nebulae of the stars<br>instead of the circus tents of these gypsy moths <br>swarming the Dutch elms like fake starmaps<br>that don't know much about shining in the dark, <br>but eat mini blackholes through the leaves <br>that have known greener days of radiance, <br>and more creative things to do with the light.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I can see the stars even in daylight <br>from the bottom of this fathomless well <br>only the snakes and the frogs and the fireflies <br>descend into to drink from the dark watershed <br>of the mystery I'm swimming through <br>like an albino bioluminescent fish through black ink<br>trying to find the words to express this sorrow <br>that overtakes me from time to time <br>as if life's waterclock had confined itself <br>to one bucket for awhile. And time had stopped. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">It's as if I could feel every wound in the world<br>pierce the hummingbird of my heart on the thorns <br>of a black rose, as if I could feel the secret grief <br>of the yellow star in the violet eye of the beautiful lady <br>who toxically weeps like the belladonna <br>under the chandeliers of the deadly nightshade <br>that cures what it kills in love <br>administering death like mercy to put her lover <br>out of his misery with an oceanic love potion<br>he can't help but thrive upon like nectar and ambrosia. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">As if I were picking up the small body of a sparrow <br>in the cradle of my hands and seeing in it, <br>its random extinction in the face of the windowpane<br>that lied, the death of the sky. And it's strange <br>that I do, that my eyes should fill with unprompted tears<br>that I'm digging a hole with my bare hands <br>in the same bed of tiger lilies I buried my goldfish in <br>like the big June bugs lying on their backs <br>perfectly preserved out in the open on the cement sidewalk<br>where I stopped to bury them with a finger for a spade, <br>when no one was looking who might laugh at me, <br>and mark their graves with two blades of grass, <br>on my way back from rugby practise, on King's Street, <br>to make sure nobody stepped on them just for fun, <br>as if death itself weren't already enough of a desecration, <br>a seeming destruction, to satisfy them for awhile. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And it's silly, I know, to bury the dead <br>in the soil of my heart as if they were bulbs <br>I planted in the fall to bloom in the spring<br>like the bells of the blue hyacinth <br>and the white gold daffodils of a pagan Easter<br>emerging like the high priestesses of a mystery religion<br>that returns resurrection to the womb of a woman.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Amorphous pain, homogeneously dispersed, <br>like the afterbirth of the background universal hiss <br>that miscarried into the post-natal depression<br>of an emptiness that keeps reversing its spin <br>on the state of things like synchronous happenings<br>in the charged particle field of a duplicitous politician, <br>like a ghost in the rain, like a faraway train, <br>my heart's the red lantern of a Chinese box-kite <br>way down the line at the last stop <br>where no one gets off, and no one arrives, <br>and there are no starmaps like tourist brochures<br>to point out like cabbies, the hotspots <br>of what's shining down upon nothing tonight. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I can feel the inhuman solitude <br>of eighty thousand prisoners sentenced <br>to years of isolation in the third eye of the pen<br>chewing on their shadows like leg-hold traps, <br>and the contemplative vengeance of their keepers<br>walking the night rounds with socks on their feet<br>in the wee hours of the morning as if it were they<br>who had avoided capture and mastered failure <br>by defeating these uncaged in their sleep. <br>As Robert Louis Stevenson said, or was it Walter de la Mare, <br>tread lightly for you tread on my dreams, <br>some like mushrooms, some like landmines.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But it isn't the kind of pain you can factor <br>a cause into like fireflies into the Slough of Despond, <br>or the Valley of Death, after the storm has passed <br>like an electric chair that's just thrown the switch. <br>It's softer than that, inclusive, embrasive, almost <br>lunar in its compassion for the least of things<br>from flies with wings torn off like the pages <br>of a calendar, June bugs, to the orphanage of asteroids <br>that nobody wanted when the solar system<br>was first forming into myriad nuclear family ways. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Not the kind of sorrow that brings rain, but <br>pain like the condensation of hydrogen clouds <br>that have been lingering like ghosts of the stars<br>they used to be, waiting to break into light<br>like the constellation of a new myth of origin <br>to explain being exiled this far from home. <br>No grave in sight, but still I mourn <br>for all the wishing wells that <br>didn't get what they wanted<br>when they kissed the moon <br>like a coin they had blessed<br>and returned to river they had retrieved it from <br>only to discover the dark side of their luck<br>when it popped up again like a sacred syllable<br>under the forked tongue of a lottery ticket.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Pain without locus, pain without focus, <br>a blur, a smear, a smudge, an atmosphere, an aura, <br>cataracts in the eyes, flowers in the sky, <br>and everywhere I see the belongings of the Beloved, <br>her passion for lightning and fireflies, <br>scattered all over this unbegotten house of life <br>like battered flowers and shattered trees <br>and power-outages that make the stars flicker<br>and black out, for days at a time, like an ice-storm<br>in the middle of summer, passing over the distant hills, <br>like a glacier following its own melting <br>all the way to the dark night sea<br>as if water, as it is to a river a raindropp and a tear<br>whether it's painted on a clown's face or not, <br>or just trying to make the mascara of the poppies run, <br>were the only guide it could trust.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And these are the green swords of the gladiolas <br>and wild violet irises down by the river <br>where the waterlilies and the corpses flow by <br>like floats in a parade of burning flowers <br>that make the river's eyes run with grief and bliss, <br>hello, farewell, good-by, as if you just saw<br>the silouhette of a bird fly across the moon <br>with a few beats of its wings, a small pulse, <br>the brief thought moment of a passing wavelength, <br>like my own, a braille dot on the starmap of a blind star, <br>with the emotions and aspirations of a Cepheid variable<br>trying to keep pace with the measure of the death march<br>beating on the drum of my heart<br>like dollops of funereal rain on a tin roof. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And what do you learn when you die like this <br>for the things you lived in the name of too long <br>to bear the loss of the world mountain <br>on the turtle of your heart when the black swan <br>of the new moon has been snapped up from below<br>as if the only way you can come to the end of things <br>is to run out of beginnings, and that hasn't happened yet<br>since the universe first broke into stars and went prime time.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">All opening nights. Everyone of them. And there are <br>scimitars of the moon at last crescent and poems and lovers <br>you can cut your wrists on like the brass moonrise <br>of a tuna fish can, if you don't really want to talk <br>to the ambulance about anything unreal as reality. <br>And you can be rushed to the emergency ward, <br>like a rose that's bleeding out, and there'll <br>you'll meet a nurse, not a nun, at the end <br>of a long tunnel of light that isn't estranged from death<br>but embodies the female principle of life <br>with a smile like a silver herb of the moon<br>and she'll inser the other fang of the snake that heals<br>into your vein like a boomslang of blood <br>hanging on the branch of a a chromium tree <br>with mandalic wheels that wobble like planets down the hall.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And there she'll teach you as you heal <br>that just as your lungs have learned to trust <br>the oxygen in the air that others are breathing along with you <br>like the Amazon jungle, fish in the sea, the flower <br>of the candle that blooms in fire, so your heart <br>that imbibes the skull cup of the moon down to its lees <br>to read the partial eclipses of your prophecies and dreams<br>like shipwrecks at the bottom of lunar seas <br>that have been drained of water, <br>drained of atmosphere and wine<br>looking for signs in dry creekbeds<br>like the lifelines on the palms of your hands, <br>must water the dust at your feet, <br>the stars above your head like the Milky Way, <br>the Road of Ghosts, your passage on earth, <br>with as many boodstreams in life <br>as it takes to float your lifeboat <br>on a bubble of the moon at high tide. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476596" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Such is life. Such is the flashflood of love <br>that makes the seven year long sleep of the frogs <br>up to their voices in starmud, sing <br>that their dream has finally come alive again, <br>and the voodoo doll of the cactus pierced with thorns, <br>flowers, and the serpent revels in the rain <br>that falls on its scales like the petals of a marigold<br>or the keys of a piano with its eighty-eights straight<br>and plays such music as it's never heard before<br>its scales turn into the feathers of a bird, or if <br>it's enlightened, the wings of a dragon of serpent fire <br>running up your spine like the sign of a healer <br>coiled around the axis of the earth like a caduceus<br>because even a single blade of grass here<br>is a strong enough medicine to give<br>the whole world vertigo like a Sufi <br>at a crossroads on the moon<br>dancing alone with dust devils<br>when things begin to overflow again<br>like a cup, like a heart with a crack and a broken handle, <br>like a watershed in a hourglass, <br>or a mirage in a desert of stars<br>because love, when it leaves home, <br>always forgets to turn the faucet off<br>like the four rivers flowing out of Eden<br>to water the root fires in the star gardens of paradise <br>when love jumps up stream like a salmon<br>coming home to the womb it will be buried in <br>like a loveletter from the sea to the moon.</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>