Patrick White Poems

Impoverished like a loser with a high IQ.
It’s a darker discipline than art
to learn to love what you must live.
The aristocratic penury of a poet
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Looking at the sky from the bottom of a well,
midnight at noon, a firefly
or a musical note deep in a flute
waiting to be played, ore in the mine,
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Writing graffiti on the blue walls of heaven
to bring them back down to earth.
Seven come eleven in reverse
I'm rolling my skull like snake-eyes
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I can feel the skin peeling off me like old paint
around this windowframe I’ve pictured myself
standing in for the last two years like an astronomer
at the shallow end of a lens, or a water snake
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In moonlight and rubber boots I loved you.
Ladies of the Lake who came like waterlilies
into my life and cast your dark sexual mysticism
over the latest initiate to pass through your veils
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Awake as the dawn approaches, my cat
curled up on the desk beside me in her liferaft of a bed,
three goldfish sleeping at the bottom of their tank.
Ashen-blue in the urn of a sky burial wounding space
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And this is the end of the road, this is the cul de sac,
and this is the white root of the black wick,
and this is the last relic in the bone-box of the heretic
who questioned what life is and went up in flames,
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All this stuff going on in my head all the time.
All my fixed constellations changing like fireflies.
All the burning ladders of my unsuccessful siege of heaven
lying down like crosswalks at the feet of the mob.
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My back aching like the sky goddess Nut doing yoga
over a sidereal painting that's burning like a bridge.
I've been many kinds of fool before, some just silly, some profound
but this is the work of a sacred clown hemorrhaging in the heavens
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Yellow wildflowers under a grey sky,
visionary smog on the dirty windows,
a genie in a crack pipe that ungrants
whatever wishes you came with
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