Patrick White Poems

Nightbird on a winter branch.
Dark blossom of the new moon,
Last kiss on the eyelids of the dead
As the snow falls like apple bloom.
...

And the poems sit there on the tracks,
on the shadows of serpentine ladders,
without engines, though moving, without diesels
to drive them, chain-letters to the world,
...

The rich will eat the poor like the krill of the sea
and grateful there is no real estate among the stars
flowering in the furrowed branches of the willow,
I stand in the backyard parking lot,
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One day your mouth just opens
like a rose or an eye or an oyster
that bloomed in the night
when you weren’t looking
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One side of my face what the world
looks like on the inside,
a mindscape I’m walking through
that changes shape whenever I do.
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Softly, softly, now; here there is no beneath or above, no hell
for miscreant flowers opening for the moon, no ghosts
who can’t find their way back to the grave. No one
is unacceptable in this place where even the dead dig
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Mad or enlightened the same, the universe
is an embryo of darkness born in upon itself, everywhere
its own womb breaking into the pulse of stars within stars,
and everywhere, the shining before the light, the dark mirror
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Young, you weep the falling moon,
Luminous willow, beside the black river
Where I drown in your pale ghost,
Each small wave, the eyelid
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Everything sings, the shadows of the winter branches against the streetlamp
laced on the windowpane ribboned by dirt, backddoors and rooftops
and yet I am enveloped in this silence without wings, this voice
that valleys the universe like a dropp of water down the spine of a leaf
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Thinking sometimes I may have gone in too far
and rendered myself mad on metaphors, thinking sometimes
...