Patrick White Poems

Tempering the carbonized steel of my heart
in a drainage ditch hissing like a snake pit
to make it impervious to the pins the colour-blind lepidopterists
keep sticking in it as if it were a voodoo doll
...

The fire hydrants look at the chandeliers of black cherries
like Leonid meteor showers they're never going to put out,
a pawn shop of new moons, a rack of tabled cue-balls.
A difference in the quality of heart, if not kind.
...

I don't want to have my eyes glazed over nacreously
if I were a grain of sand, a diamond in the rough,
living in a pearly world. Cataracts in the eye,
flowers in the sky. I don't want to live in a spiritual trance
...

Quarter moon in Sagittarius at the autumn equinox.
The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator
at the equinoctial colure. Sagitta. Arrow in Latin.
Toxos. In classical Greek. Attic dialect. As in
...

All these bottles with s.o.s. inside
but not a genie in a lamp among them.
Occasionally the Cutty Sark
in a forty pounder of whiskey,
...

When I get to the root of what I really want
it all comes down to the nothing that I've got.
If a mirror were to publish me the way I really look,
I'd look like a rootless tree, scattering all its leaves
...

When grief grows savage and there's nothing to hunt
and all your mandalas are turning back into cave paintings
running down a limestone wall like spears
in the tears of weeping shamans, and you want
...

Eyes in the shadows, in blood, in space, incubating the light
that has yet to be born, wild asters in the deflowered fields of death,
and the return of the living out of the eyeless abyss, delinquent,
and a redness in the air of this September night,
...

And should it come time to speak of the sadness
that reaches fruition in the medicine bag of the heart,
don't bring a teacher that can't heal by singing and dancing
to the wounded discipline of a lost art that's gone
...

Barley moon, tonight. Hurt deeply but don't know why.
The threshers and the raccoons and soon the Canada geese
have already done their work, so there's nothing to harvest
but a few cobs and kernels of cattle corn that look like
...