Not With The Eye, But Through It
Not with the eye, but through it
easy to see all the pristine faults and flaws
in the immaculate mirror of the lake
that asks me to surrender my sword
as proof the scars on the mirage of my identity
were not self-inflicted or mythically inflated.
Sometimes the mind is nothing but a fraud of water,
a handful of starmud from the bottom up
with an ego like the snapping turtle of the world
savaging the plumage of the moon,
a wild swan thawing like an ice-floe
riding her own reflection downstream
like the pale fragrance of an elegant loveletter.
This place is the downgraded stuff of dreams
that animates the misfortunes of decay
with calendar-eyed views of propinquitous mortality.
Stakes of ghostly bones embedded like fractured trees.
Red ochre cedars like the fragile skeletons of filigreed fish.
Dozy limbs of basswood on the damp shore
pulped by a flesh-eating disease
like the hard heart of an old man gone soft
in the limelight of a circus of fungus on tour.
Not an outrage, but a lingering kind of odium,
this whole place smells like a human on its death bed.
Stealth in the indelible silence of the dead
undergoing their dissolute transformations
into the effluvium of the living in the wake
of their passage through life. What was
solid and upright as the rung of a ladder of oak
or the lifeboats of the oar-winged maple keys
before they went down with the ship,
good captains, all, with nowhere left to fall,
let's its hair down like wavelengths and willows
and returns to going with the flow of things
like ice melting into water again, everything real,
with nothing to stub your toe upon
like the imagined intransigence of the world.
Wing of bat, eye of newt, heart of toad
and the perfect pitch of a virgin hummingbird,
mummified skin from the leaves
of the star clusters of borage sapphires,
the ashes of a poem that immolated itself
like daylilies that no one had ever cried over,
the unreasoned ennui of a seasoned wizard's
attitude toward suffering to play musical chairs
at the periodic table and rise above the salt
where you properly belong enthroned like a dragon
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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