I Refuse
I refuse to persuade any emotion to a poem
like a horse I can lead to water but can't make drink.
If it's a straitjacket it's a straitjacket.
When its a wet suit it's a wet suit
to go swimming with stars in. Tea leaves.
Yarrow sticks. Tarot decks. Incinerated match books.
I listen to a poem as if it were a response
to what I've said, and didn't say.
I like the counter play of voices and mine
one among them, the whole tree full of birds,
and the chatter of black squirrels in the walls.
Midway between a car starting up and a stanza break
when I write, I feel like a thief that stole the prison
under the warden's nose, and broke out through the window,
exhilarated by the bliss of getting away with my freedom.
I'm on an island alone with the moon.
And it doesn't matter if I was marooned
or just washed up here like a wounded paint rag.
My spine is smoke. I drift tribes away from the fires
that send me like a message to the stars
without knowing what it is I'm going to say to them.
Until I get there like a crane-bag full of alphabets
and a couple of mystic words I'm keeping to myself.
Siderealized. Space speaks through its mere presence
like a field of unnamed wildflowers. Star clusters.
And there's a solitude you can't help answering
that gets deeper every time you open your mouth.
You stop fooling yourself about time the moment
it's realized there is none. You break the bones
of the sturdy ladders of all-well-and-good-but.
You crush the fossils of the crutches you once crawled upon,
take off your spurs, turn your scales into feathers,
and the wind comes along and fits wings to your heels.
Things stop being solid and become real. So
when I write everything writes along with me,
every leaf that falls upon the river like a map
changes the course of the flowing and I let it
and every fallen tree's got its hand on the rudder
and I say if not that way, where?
And the waves all answer in unison, here.
And even the loneliest guitar that ever sat under a willow
and thought of the home that wasn't there to go back to anymore
can feel crowded when myriad words begin
to introduce you to their relatives by close association,
and shades in the closets of the chameleons
that rainbows haven't worn in a thousand years.
You can see things through gravitational eyes
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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