Patrick White Poems

wild and beautiful, astonishing as the stars
through an open window, simple and stylish
as a single-petalled rose, amorous as
a strawberry as brash as it was shy,
...

That moment of love when life calls to itself
and the summons is answered creatively
and people and things come forth, the stillness
moves and the silence is a song sweeter than words,
...

O, an oasis in a tarpit when being alive
is more than enough, and happiness doesn’t scare me
half as much as it used to. It’s only an eyelid,
an opening and closing of doors, a Cepheid variable,
...

Tears spin off your midnight oilslicks
like sad, romantic novels with sexually suggestive faucets
you can turn on and off, and that’s okay
if you’re out watering your lawn in a drought,
...

Alcohol, sex, and this cold spring night in their blood,
the rowdies outside the Crown and Thistle have taken
their chilly elations home. Past midnight, the town quiescent,
the moon, Venus and Jupiter set, the silence of the stars
...

Evaporating in a black fire.
Don't want to drink the night from the window again.
Won't be a chain trying to escape itself
when I'm already free,
...

Late spring snow on its way.
Dead ochres and colourless greys
that have never heard of the impressionists.
It's a landscape
...

I long for words that don’t exist;
I long for a light
that my eyes have never flowered in before,
but hope is a gravedigger
...

Crossing the river on thin ice, the next step
the beginning, and the one after that
the end and the whole of the rest of your life.
I’m listening for cracks in a mirror.
...

Mauled by the infidel lions of savage hope;
my voice looking for its wings in the ashes of heroic doves
who were immolated like love letters
in my chronic cremation of the world that scorned me like a seed
...