Patinas Of Distinction Poem by Patrick White

Patinas of distinction trying to green the terminated poets.
Death drools its cruel elixirs. Perfume
from ambergris, whale vomit for those
who have the stomach for it, dung
under the snow, then come the squabbling sparrows
to tend upon God in her rehabilitated ruins.

Literary forensics putting flesh back on the skull.
Red threads of blood in the nests
they build for themselves like pyres of cosmic eggs
in the tree where the poet hung
like a poached bird, a plumb bob of the depths,
a pendulum in a still life with choreographed knives.

The cooing pigeons who write with flight feathers
plucked from fledgling suicides. Water has a voice
of its own, the blood, the wind, three octaves
of fire. Here come the uninspired
with insulation, rebar and cement.
And even road kill's got an undertaker.

A telescope's more of a work of art
with a poetic vision of the stars
all waiting to greet you like long lost relatives
and friends, at the end of a dark tunnel
than the barrow tombs of all these
blind, star-nosed moles grubbing
among their damp root fires
to add their smouldering voices
in Braille like singularities
to a dying tradition of black holes.

Equinoctial careerists of their fair-minded lies,
they damn the solstice for taking
more of a stand in summer and winter
like a Stonehenge of the light
and lament the evanescence
of spring and fall that sheds them
like roseate petals of snake skin
that strike the heart like toxic sins of omission.

The sheep are hunting the tigers to death
and there are maggots in the moonlight
like toxicara worms eating the hearts and eyes
out of Mozart and Liszt to see what they saw,
to see what they did, but maggots
never turn into butterflies, and in time,
their lives are fined for fouling the footpath
like commas of excrement in the aftermath
of all the winged heels that stepped in it
like Sylvia Plath in a hive of killer bees
making a grand entrance of her exit
like the black queen of the uninhabited planets
in the corona of the starcluster in Cancer.