Patrick White Poems

I don't think the wind sings for me alone
even in this isolated space where it
silvers the leaves of the Russian olives
like musical scales. Or every thought and emotion,
...

Who looks for the sea by following its waves?
Or the sky by following the flights of birds?
Or their mind with their mind?
Who looks for seeing with their eyes?
...

Not again, tonight, these fin de siecle blues
that subsume all my blossoming overviews
into the mystic specificity of concrete things
I stub my heart against as if I'd just had
...

My third eye opening oceanically of its own accord.
The wingspans of the flowers bloom omnidirectionally.
The blue sky lays a balmy smile upon my flightfeathers.
Blood hums to the blissful resonance of being alive.
...

When imagination and reality are one
and there's no recourse for civilization
to distinguish between them by usage and consensus,
and the light of the stars isn't condemned
...

I see you've made a gate
of the skeleton of the wing of the bird
you should have set free.
And it's closed like a book you haven't read.
...

Like a river in its running, like life, like time, like mind
no point of departure that isn't also a moment of arrival.
Toxic parasols and meteor showers shot precisely
out of the green radiants of the candling umbrellas
...

The grave up ahead hasn't chastened my longings,
nor joy become an offence to the probity of death.
Life's not a protocol I'm trying to master
to approach the eternal orthodoxy in good form.
...

The leaves sluicing the rain down the back of my neck
to put out my candle of serpent-fire
like an orchid in an abandoned house well,
lightning in its tears, thunder in the hollow
...

I circumnavigated my eyes
to wash these ashen rags of grief off
like the torn sails of the Magellanic Clouds.
I knew how deeply I was lost
...