Patrick White Poems

Let me be worthy of the river
and the strange ores that glow at night,
buried like teachers in the mountain;
let my blood always taste of the moon
...

Ten hours a day painting in the half wild fields
at Long Bay, eleven miles outside of Westport
for four and a half years without
seeing another human for months in the winter
...

The stars so near it seems the approaching morning
could wet its thumb and forefinger
and pinching their wicks like intimate candles
that have held the lovers close
...

for Simon and Samantha

What do we know, what does all our knowledge amount to
in these infinite spaces of ours, within and without,
...

Tired of supplying the stars their skeletons,
or webbing them into constellations
like love-letters written in prison,
or dusting the hieroglyphics of their fossils
...

It’s writing me.
I’m not writing it.
It’s got nothing to do with obedience
and there’s no chance of betraying it
...

If you’ve come this far
by the very fact you could
your solitude is marked for exile.
Those who sustain
...

Bitter, bitter, bitter, the taste of men and the curdled perfumes
of their women putting on weight like the moon
and the gaudy hopelessness of their ejaculant children
living in the extinct carapace of a condemned volcano; bitter the lies
...

And the rose of someone else’s dawn,
a warning to drowned sailors,
mingling in the shadows and the leaves
just beyond the bay of the window where I stand
...

There, you see, I let you go, just like that, open my hand
like milkweed, like dandelion, a grave full of ghosts
and let space take the parachutes and parasols,
chimney-sparks and fireflies in a gust of wind by a dark lake,
...