Patrick White Poems

There's a woman in the doorway
flaking like a rose of red paint
with eyes that have been weeping
the shadows of dead saints, a full eclipse
...

Jupiter gone from the window. Homage
to the ambiguously forgotten moments of light
that shine down upon the earth awhile
whether anyone's watching this time of night
...

Fifty years of wrestling with the dark angel in the way.
You'd think we'd be friends by now. Blue flower
rooted in all that dark energy standing like an eclipse
in the burning corona of the doorway, the flammable sugar maple
...

A seance of sprites and ghouls in the cabals of emptiness
as the train whistle mourns across town out of the darkness
looking for its lost child somewhere along the tracks
where last night's waning moon put its head
...

These words are not meant to burn your smile.
I lay them gently like cool herbs on your cracked lips.
This light takes its shoes off before it enters your eyes
like shrines to the apostate darkness that lives within you
...

What an impasse, quiet moment, come to this
deeper than a bell in the dead of winter. Grime
on the grey windows as if I were living inside
a sooty lantern, consuming the flesh of my body
...

I've grown old remembering you when you were young.
How much wiser we were then though we didn't know it
than I am now, or you would have been, had you lived.
Ignorant of the outcome of desire, sometimes it's better
...

A rock in the current, a skull in the river,
time patiently washing away the sidereal silt of my mind
as if insight were alluvial. You can't keep
what you won't give away so fling it from you
...

And should I ask forgiveness, who do I ask it of
and for what, being unredemptively what I must be?
Descending into moonset or failing to rise?
Maybe my eyes let the stars down somehow,
...

Existing nocturnally in a covert hole in the dark,
I eat the stars like a trap door spider taking the hood
off its telescope, a black hole ten million times
the mass of the sun, I shine from within, beading
...