Click in the field, then press CTRL+C to copy the HTML code
<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476800" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Not With The Eye, But Through It</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476800" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Not with the eye, but through it<br>easy to see all the pristine faults and flaws <br>in the immaculate mirror of the lake <br>that asks me to surrender my sword <br>as proof the scars on the mirage of my identity<br>were not self-inflicted or mythically inflated. <br>Sometimes the mind is nothing but a fraud of water, <br>a handful of starmud from the bottom up <br>with an ego like the snapping turtle of the world <br>savaging the plumage of the moon, <br>a wild swan thawing like an ice-floe<br>riding her own reflection downstream <br>like the pale fragrance of an elegant loveletter. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476800" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">This place is the downgraded stuff of dreams <br>that animates the misfortunes of decay <br>with calendar-eyed views of propinquitous mortality.<br>Stakes of ghostly bones embedded like fractured trees.<br>Red ochre cedars like the fragile skeletons of filigreed fish.<br>Dozy limbs of basswood on the damp shore<br>pulped by a flesh-eating disease<br>like the hard heart of an old man gone soft <br>in the limelight of a circus of fungus on tour.<br>Not an outrage, but a lingering kind of odium, <br>this whole place smells like a human on its death bed. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476800" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Stealth in the indelible silence of the dead<br>undergoing their dissolute transformations<br>into the effluvium of the living in the wake <br>of their passage through life. What was <br>solid and upright as the rung of a ladder of oak <br>or the lifeboats of the oar-winged maple keys <br>before they went down with the ship, <br>good captains, all, with nowhere left to fall, <br>let's its hair down like wavelengths and willows <br>and returns to going with the flow of things<br>like ice melting into water again, everything real, <br>with nothing to stub your toe upon <br>like the imagined intransigence of the world. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476800" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Wing of bat, eye of newt, heart of toad <br>and the perfect pitch of a virgin hummingbird, <br>mummified skin from the leaves <br>of the star clusters of borage sapphires, <br>the ashes of a poem that immolated itself <br>like daylilies that no one had ever cried over, <br>the unreasoned ennui of a seasoned wizard's<br>attitude toward suffering to play musical chairs <br>at the periodic table and rise above the salt <br>where you properly belong enthroned like a dragon<br>on the skulls of your incommensurable ancestors.<br> <br>Salt the earth and it will burn green as leaves <br>in the fires of life nothing can put out. <br>The axis mundi stirs the seabeds of the ocean<br>and visionary wraiths hang above it like rags of mist <br>summoned to the cauldron of the lake <br>like a seance to the endless first step <br>of an ongoing beginning that calls them out of exile, <br>like the lords of life from the last exorcism <br>they went through like the imperfectible ideals <br>of the wind sweeping stars and deserts off the stairs<br>of an underground passage burial <br>that aimed its spirit at the stars in Orion <br>but whose bones only made it as far as a flashlight <br>in the nervous hands of a grave robber <br>startled by his own amazement <br>at whose likeness embers in old gold <br>on the death mask that greets him like a twin of time.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476800" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Waterlilies blooming nocturnally in algaic scum <br>as if they were spreading their feathers <br>for any chance encounter with the stars <br>they've fallen in love with in their own images.<br>Stumps of the beavers, and here and there, <br>the occasional chain saw, I hear a man shrieking <br>in the tent of a field hospital trying to heal the Civil War<br>with the tools of neo-lithic carpenters. <br>I hear the crow barking orders to its officers.<br> <br>Significance by association with the lost and fallen <br>bleeding out like flags on an abandoned battle field. <br>You fall through the cracks if you don't jump the gaps <br>and the rest is just the history of electricity<br>prodding you to twitch like the puppet-master <br>of Giovanni's frog prodded into leaping like the dead <br>trying to keep pace with the measure of their hearts <br>like lily pads wired to circuitous nervous systems <br>grounded in the silken muck at the bottom of things<br>that has settled like a peaceful sediment <br>over the useful refuse of our unsalvaged dreams.<br>The encyclopedic detritus of our arboreal souls<br>we keep recurring out of like cosmic eggs<br>in a deep sleep of inconceivable wonders to come.<br> <br>Wingspans of the galaxies in the eyes of the seed-atoms, <br>I sow my thoughts and feelings like symbols and images <br>as far and wide as the Milky Way, the Road of Ghosts, <br>like an old farmer I heard of who went mad out here <br>sowing the deep woods, holding on to the tail <br>of a black bull that tugged at his heart like a new moon<br>or the harvest of stars in the wild rice fields of the Pleiades<br>adorning the horns of Taurus in a garland of light<br>so the wide-eyed native women could thresh them <br>into the bows of their birch bark canoes.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476800" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">How long ago was that? Is there still <br>an Algonquin village around here somewhere <br>that didn't surrender its gates to the urgencies of time? <br>Some memory smouldering like a fire pit under the leaves <br>that have written over the history of this place <br>like draught after draught of an autumnal lie ever since? <br>Did they ever come down to the water like me <br>to watch the moonlight ricochet off <br>the wet anthracite scales of a rat snake<br>sliding its S-curves back into the water<br>like a wavelength of darkness alone and homeless <br>in the occult palace of its black diamond eyes? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476800" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Did they feel the same chill of recognition <br>when it disappeared like a sacred insight<br>into an abyss of enlightened unknowing <br>that's as boundless as the myriad infinitudes <br>of forms and events that arise <br>out of the creative destruction of the mind <br>efflorescing out of its own ashes, sunflowers at dawn<br>when the urns convulse like wombs, <br>and flowers imitate the garish rainbows <br>of our afterbirth like the palette of a masterpiece<br>that's caught the ruin and renewal of life <br>in the enigmatic features of our photogenic minds? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476800" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Posing like mood-shifting chameleons <br>aurorally lifting the veils of a dark mirror <br>to reveal our own eyes looking back at us <br>when the night turns around, saturated <br>like ripe fruit with the mysterious sorrows<br>of being alive to witness our own windfall <br>like a rootless tree well-seasoned in letting go<br>of the orchards that once danced with the wind <br>in their wedding gowns, climbing up <br>this scaffolding of bones like a serpent of picture-music <br>helically winding up the stairwells of our vertebrae <br>like a thought making the rounds <br>of an unbroken circle of zodiacal skulls <br>like boundary stones in an unsustainable orbit, <br>all living things perfecting the simplicity of death <br>in the labyrinth of their own elaboration <br>by reducing it to an axiom of collaborative absurdity<br>then erecting it like a meteoric cornerstone <br>above the graves they dig for themselves <br>monolithically from the sky down, <br>one foot in the boat and the other clinging to shore.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476800" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I can hear the music of the spheres <br>in the hidden harmonies of dark matter <br>I've been listening to for light years <br>like a song with an impact crater for a sea bed<br>I just can't seem to get out of my head and heart.<br> <br>I've apprenticed my darkness to the mastery <br>of a dying art that might make the dead <br>a little more lyrically approachable<br>when the picture-music shepherds them<br>like black sheep born under a new moon <br>into the available dimensions of the future.<br> <br>In everything I see and say and do here <br>I celebrate the emergence of the carrying forth <br>of the light out of the dark urgent with expression.<br> <br>I say tree, stone, star, love, birth, death.<br> <br>Lonely nightbird, or one of the frogs at night, <br>I make my sound like my mark upon life, <br>I add my eddy of light, the ripples of my fingerprints <br>to the flowing. As ignorant of where I come from <br>as I am of where I'm going, as homeless behind me <br>as it is ahead, there's an expiring calendar <br>of tree rings in my heartwood, waning or waxing, <br>always seems to be growing. What has my tongue <br>ever been, but a leaf on the wind, or my eyes, <br>if not stars coming out of clouds? Delusion<br>or clarity, the crazy wisdom of the madly enlightened, <br>or sorrow looking for asylum in its own vulnerability, <br>the lab rat in a random experiment with genetic lotteries, <br>or my voice disappear like the homing bird <br>of a word in the distance flying toward <br>the violet hills that adumbrate the sunset in residence? </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=476800" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">A physics of the heart, or the logic of metaphor, <br>two ends of the same sky-borne telescope. <br>Whether they're eyelashes or my eyes <br>are sprouting wings for the journey ahead, <br>effortless effort of the absurd, <br>or a labour of elusive significance, <br>I struggle to celebrate the vital stillness <br>that animates the heart of all things <br>into being carried away on impulse<br>like water and love and life and light <br>or thousands of fireflies swarming the valley <br>after a storm of insight, trying to acquit themselves <br>like constellations in a chaos of starmaps.</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>