Patrick White Poems

Yes, the awful thresholds.
The taboos of lace and razorwire
that threshed our blood like kings of the waxing year,
queens that were crowned like the full moon in broken windows.
...

Sitting here becoming whatever drifts my way.
Cedar boughs smouldering in an attic to smoke the bats out.
Thought-watching without looking for the answer to anything.
Spiders like badges walking on the waters of my mind.
...

Narcissus lost his face in the mirror he stored his image in
while Lady Nightshade was saying grace over the wrong coffin
rats from the shipwreck were rowing ashore
in the last lifeboat with a trapdoor in it for an emergency exit.
...

Just want to stay inside. Don't want to see anybody.
Don't want to be anybody. Just want to forget for awhile
that I exist. I'm sick of being besieged behind my eyelids
by a hundred thousand ghosts all gibbering at me
...

Angry, smashing antiquated croci like Faberge Easter eggs.
The air is rationing its oxygen, and even the wind begs.
I'm holding it all together like an abandoned barn,
but there are flashfloods in the mirror trying to humble
...

The night dances with itself like an only child
to the sounds of its own silence
when it thinks no one is watching.
Every falling leaf, a gesture of the hands,
...

Poetry used to live in a forbidden state of courageous grace
But now it's palpably culpable of cowardice.
Paper-mache lifemasks with all the characteristics
Of a gaping sin of omission. As F.R. Scott said of E.J. Pratt
...

in memory of Heidi Clow

What did you see just before you committed suicide?
Did the snake mesmerize the bird that used to sing inside
...

You don't come. Your absence is a guillotine. My heart
Plummets from the altitude it risked in looking forward
To a day with you outside of time and circumstance, jumps
From the edge of paradise, the flat earth, the back
...

Those nights I went out with a butcher's knife
down the dark alley between our house
and the triplex next door, twelve years old,
my courage running down my leg, to stab
...