Patrick White Poems

Your face among many, a blossom.
Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.
The sun can't understand why it can't
open the buds of the parking meters.
...

Slowly over the years
like a queen cobra that didn't like
the music she was dancing to,
the right song but the wrong flute,
...

Every word turns away
shame-faced and a liar
when you try to say things so true
they could only be contaminated
...

You read my poetry
and you need a locus,
something to hang on to,
a familiar milieu, a focus,
...

The rain's falling upward
and I'm rooted in the clouds.
I'm riffing with the greening of my leaves
without a flute, letting my thoughts grow
...

Your own life is the way
whether it charm itself through the woods
like a small snail
or kick the stars up like dust
...

I have become my own season
living through these renewable eras of you
that come and go
like the fragrances of passing stars
...

Something said softly in the night
like a tendril on a windowsill
tasting the moon, a whisper, a word
that walked in the light without
...

Who isn't trying to live
as they vaguely hope they are
whatever extremes of moderation they've gone to
behind all the masks and fraud?
...

Lightning hits the horns of the morning snail
like the tines of a tuning fork
and the larkspur sees in the ashes of the holy one,
a tiny urn, no bigger than a cigar butt,
...