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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476629" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>I Don't Want To Have My Eyes Glazed Over Nacreously</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476629" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I don't want to have my eyes glazed over nacreously <br>if I were a grain of sand, a diamond in the rough, <br>living in a pearly world. Cataracts in the eye, <br>flowers in the sky. I don't want to live in a spiritual trance<br>blissed out like the first crescent of the moon <br>smiling down upon everything as if I weren't <br>attached to any particular atmosphere and all <br>the waters of life were frozen like tears in a jewelled locket <br>I kiss once in awhile in a rush of gushing devotion. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476629" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I love the mystic details of the concrete specifics of the world. <br>The stylus of the birds that can write with their beaks and feet<br>like cuneiform on the skin of an apple, <br>and wormholes that burrow even deeper <br>into the sweetness of the flesh, neolithic barrow tombs <br>aligned with the vernal equinox, and that soft blue talc <br>as if the dew had turned to powder that clings to the autumn grapes.<br>I like the spelling errors fate makes <br>on the staves of our foreheads where it writes <br>the picture-music of our destinies in such a way <br>that everything that's written there, over the course of time, <br>our eyes will live long enough to see.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476629" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I don't want to turn my spirit into a cosmic perfumery<br>and extract my essence from the ambergris of my presence.<br>I don't want to transform whale vomit into an alluring fragrance <br>that isn't naturally its own. Or suggest to certain flowers <br>they gargle the rain like mouthwash, or smear <br>the eyelids of the rose with a snailtrack of stars.<br>What did the Zen master say? The stone is lustrous, <br>but there's nothing inside. The ore is different <br>but from it comes gold. Why hide the bruises and scars, <br>sunspots like black eyes, or the pitted complexion of the moon <br>from the third eye of Galileo's telescope trying futilely<br>to show a Vatican cardinal the mutability of the firmament? <br>Things are rough out there, and happenstance is neither fair<br>nor unjust. Things pass into their return like the earth <br>going around the sun in a five billion year old roulette wheel, <br>and every asteroid might dream it could grow up to be <br>the cornerstone of a planet, and then come down <br>on the dinosaurs like an avalanche without sin <br>that threw the first rock at Mary Magdalene. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476629" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I don't want to disperse every breath I take and exhale<br>aurorally like veils, as lovely as they are, over the face of the sky<br>as if it had something indecent to hide like snow on a dungheap. <br>I don't think the dung needs to be dressed up like a festering virgin <br>that needs to be purified. Snowflakes on a slow methane furnace <br>I think the dung and the snow go the way of all flesh<br>though some walk, some run, some flow, some evaporate<br>and some are just inflammably combustible, but all<br>know their own way back to their roots as well as anyone. <br>Never known a river that needed a guru <br>to find its own way back to the sea, or a cloud <br>that was ever unhappy about the way it was shaped by the wind.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476629" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I wash my hands, and I'm bathed in the waters of Jordan. <br>I open my eyes, and God says fiat lux, let there be light. <br>I walk over to the window and look down on the morning street<br>and Muhammad makes that my quibla, my direction of prayer, <br>and under the eaves there's a mourning dove <br>singing the shahada like a muezzin to its young. <br>I put my clothes on, slowly rising to consciousness <br>until my thirteenth year and I'm wearing my tallit and tefillin<br>at my own bar mitzvah, listening for the Aliyah <br>to call me up and recite the Torah. I admire the stamina<br>of the petunias still brimming over the rims of the whiskey barrels <br>municipally placed between the parking meters<br>in a biting autumn wind, and the Buddha hands <br>Ananda a flower and smiles as if I could understand him.<br>I rescue a fly from drowning in a toilet bowl<br>with a piece of kleenex like something it can cling to <br>because I think one day that could be me<br>praying for a lifeboat, and Beelzebub commends me <br>for my lack of discrimination, and Lucifer's intrigued<br>while Jesus befriends me because my compassion isn't fastidious. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476629" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">What's so unspiritual about mundanity as it is? <br>Samsara is nirvana. Delusion the door to enlightenment.<br>Every chore, a religious ritual, a do, a path in a participatory world. <br>Every farmer in the Perth Restaurant at their daily coffee clutch<br>a sage as wise as the rocks and stumps he's cleared <br>like a backhoe from his fields laid out like scripture<br>covered in mustard, goldenrod, vetch and purple loosestrife.<br>Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You want to touch the soul, <br>it's not out there out of palpable reach, it's <br>the starmud between your fingers and your toes, <br>under your nails, the sweetmeat of your brain <br>in a black walnut shell, the very stuff your hands are made of. <br>And this is more of a mystery than looking for it anywhere else.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476629" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The black-eyed Susans, the New England asters, <br>the last of the wildflowers aren't just things to look at <br>but seers in themselves the stars consult like oracles <br>of what's to come, and when you look at the maple trees aflame<br>who needs anymore martyrs or heretics than that, <br>and sometimes you can even see Raphael throwing his paintings <br>in the Bonfire of the Vanities while Savanarola rails like the wind<br>against the Medici he's trying to drive out of Florence<br>or the Taliban trying to purge what's she's reading <br>out of a young girl's eyes with the formic acids <br>of stinging nettles and ant heaps clinging to the Koran <br>like a no trespassing sign at all the crossroads of life <br>where the Sufis whirl like galaxies into rapturous extinction<br>and Allah sends no more rasuls like prophets with books <br>and forgoes the words for the grammar of natural things<br>as signs of the Friend within and without<br>and everything's a metaphor of the tauhid and unity <br>of the worlds within worlds in light upon light.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476629" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Work is as much a form of worship when you see it right<br>as the Hindus do, as love is. So when you're feeding the cats <br>or putting out oats for the horses, this is the mysticism of action <br>beyond the contemplative, actualizing the abstract <br>in an act of devotion such that for every roofing nail <br>a carpenter drives into a rafter, a temple is built in the heart, <br>and hundreds of loveletters are released for free <br>like doves and flamingoes or sidereal swans and eagles, <br>Japanese plum blossoms into the sky that writes back like the moon.<br> <br>And, yes, there are times when I go mad in my isolation cell <br>and fling my inkpot at the wall like Luther at the Devil, <br>and want to get out of here so badly I set my desk afire <br>and let it drift like a Viking funeral ship all the way to the bottom <br>and the next thing you know coral's trying to grow<br>a Gothic cathedral out of it, complete with angels and gargoyles, <br>virgins and saints, and grief turned fluid once more <br>is flowing like a river of stone back to the sky again<br>as all the masons and their families that laid the heritage field stones <br>dance around it like fish in the Great Barrier Reef<br>as the cardinals stand around in their bifurcated, goose-necked, <br>bi-valved barnacle hats astonished by what metaphors can achieve <br>polyp by polyp, dropp by dropp in a limestone cave, star by star <br>in an expanding universe, or cell by cell in the body of a human<br>when imagination is free to work in tandem with the random<br>like genetic mutations on helical stairwells of dna <br>sliding down the bannisters as if even evolution <br>were a game of spiral snakes and ladders with oxymoronic rungs<br>and if you're lucid and want make things clear as starmud <br>you have to resort to speaking in tongues.</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>