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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476767" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Muskrat Skull, Albino Asteroid, Chunk of the Moon</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476767" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Muskrat skull, albino asteroid, chunk of the moon<br>fallen to earth, ivory doorknob picked clean <br>by ants and wolves, half your teeth stacked like books <br>on a shelf behind the crescent moons of your fangs <br>and their reflections, as above so below, <br>that don't quite meet in the middle of the bridge<br>you're building like an engineer with overbite. <br>When I look down upon your cranium from above it's <br>a beautiful amphora, handles like arms at its side, <br>a woman hoisting her long skirt up to cross a river.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476767" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Musquash, you must be a holy food if they let the Catholics <br>eat you at Lent in place of fish because you spend <br>so much of your time aquatically. Do the wolves, <br>the owls, the foxes, the mink, the hawks, the fishers, <br>the feral dogs know they're enlightened <br>by the flesh of your body? You, alone, of all <br>the animals who tried and failed, the Gabriel<br>of the native creation myth that touched bottom <br>to bring back the starmud that made the earth, <br>the Gilgamesh of these Canadian wetlands. <br>Did a rat snake steal your herb of immortality<br>from the shrines of the cattails you build <br>at the water's edge, the bigger the harsher<br>the winter to come, like siloes you can take shelter in? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476767" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Little rodent, here by the river tonight, where <br>I'm sitting with my heart as skinless as yours<br>under the stars whose light feels like thorns of insight<br>piercing my blood, you are my only companion. <br>I look into the gaping sockets of your eyes<br>glacially excavated like most of the lakes around here, <br>though my third eye is aloof and impersonal <br>compared to the other two, and I realize <br>how ruthless enlightenment is, still, little guru, <br>I want to cry like a river that's come to rest in them<br>because I can see in you, like a locket of bone, <br>the same image of life, the Beloved, <br>I carry in the moonrock of my own prophetic skull. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476767" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Did the wolves do this? Did the pike eat your young <br>and cousin of the vole and lemming, you achieved <br>your climacteric like stars at the zenith of a precipice<br>and commit suicide at the atavistic urging of ancient enzymes? <br>Or did you die naturally like moonset in its crone phase, <br>the light slowly seeping from your eyes? Best fur<br>bundled up in yourself for the winter, your tail had scales.<br>What happened to them? Were they feathered <br>like dinosaurs into the boas of vaudeville strippers<br>that teased you with the mystery of their nakedness <br>and yours, by holding something back from the revelation <br>so there would be something left to dream on next time<br>like this amulet of your skull cradled in my hands? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476767" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Nocturnal janitor of the pond after all the lights <br>were turned off and the raucous business of the crows <br>had gone home for the night, what stars did you sweep up <br>like fallen blossoms and waterlilies trashed on the shoreline<br>like the first draft of origami swans <br>that couldn't swim in the heights with Aquila and Cygnus, <br>attached as they were to the earth like kites <br>at the end of their spinal cords, until the stars took pity <br>upon their lunar aspirations and landing like waterbirds <br>on the pond, came down like bodhisattvas <br>to teach them how to fly when five petals open <br>and one flower blooms from a seed of fire <br>that travels on the wind? Undertaker and midwife <br>what did you bury under the root fires of the hearths<br>of the bronze age barrow tombs you lived in with the dead<br>from one equinox to the next standing on your threshold? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476767" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Ubiquitous creature, materfamilias of the litter, <br>or randy male, lingham in the yoni of the yellow lotus, <br>Muscascus, it is red, your Algonquin name, <br>what spiritual immunity did evolution bless you with <br>that you could live in the sulphurous streams that ran <br>from the eyes of the coal mines smearing their mascara<br>at their first sight of hell they tunnelled into, <br>rooting for diamonds stashed by the star-nosed moles, <br>and thrive in the same polluted waters that killed <br>people, frogs and fish? Teach me that, if you can. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476767" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I'm an island of a man in the middle of a dirty river.<br>I'm a human on a barge of the moon that's dumping<br>the garbage of my species into the gutter of the sea<br>that returns like high tide to the bay <br>in the waters of the womb I was born in <br>like a salmon to swim upstream against <br>the effluvium of the tomb that washed me out <br>of my vision of life like something that got in its eyes<br>or one of your tumuli in the spring run off<br>when the river ravens with the wolves along its own shores<br>sweeping the baskets you weave of reeds <br>for orphaned prophets far out to these oceanic nights <br>among the wavelengths of life and death I share with you. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476767" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Millions of leaves on the ground like the fossils of flames<br>snuffed out on the candelabras of the trees of life, <br>the stars may have their crystal skulls, <br>but yours and mine are mineralized calcium phosphate, <br>fire and milk, the moon among the corals, <br>where the living and the dead cohabitate<br>like collagen turning to concrete in an underwater reef<br>that will rip the keels out of our driftwood lifeboats<br>like the envelopes of unanswerable loveletters <br>cut open from the bottom up. But no shelf <br>of exotic curiosities in the lost and found of my studio, <br>no bauble of death to alarm the sedimentary books<br>above my cherrywood desk for you my friend. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476767" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I leave you where you lie upon the earth <br>on the banks of life beside my mindstream, <br>nightwatchman of the pond, nurse on the nightshift. <br>I circle you three times like a spiritual orbiter <br>a Zen master in bloom, your skull, not <br>the spent canister of a milk weed pod, <br>but a wild orchid supple as moonlight <br>even in death as in bliss, attending <br>to the business of nirvana like a passing cornerstone <br>in a clearing of this floating world you weeded <br>like the empty cup of your eye socket <br>I look into like a despondent stranger into a black hole<br>and feel the passionate insight of your eyebeams <br>shining up at me like stars reading <br>the Braille of my face with fingertips of light <br>to see if I've understood yet that life in its passage<br>is an enlightened message, not the frightened warning <br>that ushers the dead back to their graves before morning.</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>