Patrick White Poems

The night with the personality of an indelible ink blot
that just leaked into my pocket no doubt trying to print its own money
as a fast lane to prosperity as the dumptrucks, snowploughs, snow blowers,
front loaders raise and lower their blades and buckets
...

The mystery doesn't come with windows and points of view,
errors of perception, smudges, smears, labyrinthine fingerprints
on grimy glass, half-legible runes of names people longed for
last year, breathless palimpsests under a glaze of nicotine
...

The night with the personality of an indelible ink blot
that just leaked into my pocket no doubt trying to print its own money
as a fast lane to prosperity as the dumptrucks, snowploughs, snow blowers,
front loaders raise and lower their blades and buckets
...

Always writing in the shadow of an avalanche,
ashes on a white page, miscarriage of an urn,
are they mine, a freak of time, Stonehenge around a firepit?
My ears pinned flat against my head like a brow beaten cat,
...

Accord me a gentle theme, just for a moment, let the world
touch me lightly as if I were a burn victim.
Too much hate and pain, the chronic atrocity
of everyone acting as lame as Jacob, Vulcan
...

The night that heals the broken day.
The dark that mends the shattered lamp.
The moon that salves the puncture wound.
The star that welds the injured eye
...

The empowered poet gets no sleep.
There are lines written on his forehead
that his eyes must see in the dark.
Time, destiny, the shells he shucked
...

Maybe if we all started out relating to each others' deaths
we'd do a lot better loving one another while we're alive.
Even in the heart of the swallow, the great finality
of our blood dropping the heavy red curtains on the play
...

Comet in the west just after sunset
between the Great Square of Pegasus and Pisces,
breath on a windowpane, a smudge of light
as a warning, a blessing, a curse, the Ides of March,
...

Spring rain in the small hours of the morning,
exlixir of leaves, tears of anthracite on the asphalt streets,
drumming circles rippling out of every pulse of the heart
that makes an impact, ghosts of gasoline thrown
...