Patrick White Poems

I could say nothing. Or I could exert my imagination
to say the way it never is, nothing but exceptions
working to rule, functional disparities between chaos
and clarified thought, the dream grammars
...

I can see the love and the loss in your green, green eyes again,
Stars away from the light I wanted to be in your life.
Deadly nightshade and sunflowers, I remember the loveletters
That used to arrive like wounded doves with strawberry hearts
...

I don’t squander my time seeking out design flaws in chaos.
I celebrate the intelligent randomness of a creative universe
predicated on the spontaneity of the copulative verb
that never interfered in my being here in the first place.
...

Yes, to give all, to ennoble the calling,
Suffer the anguish of the rising and falling
Of the unemblazoned stars, nameless heralds
Of the blood, mute hermits of our lost
...

My little book’s out there being read by someone
I hope somewhere like the plank of a shipwreck
with my name on it, the flyleaf of an artificial coral reef,
you gotta go deep, you gotta drown your book
...

Cold sunshine in the chilly enlightenment of the dawn.
A paint rag of dreams I’m working on. I study
the grime on the window like the gnostic gospel
of a dead docetist I’m trying to decipher.
...

Make my path into the void clear and wide.
Purify my absence in the waters of life.
Let the silence I was improvised out of
like a meaning to a life that didn’t make any sense,
...

The sums of autumn, the dark abundance of windfalls
on the ageing bough, a man, or a bell, groaning
under the weight of itself to cast the burden of its ripeness
down like a heart that’s been tolling in the sunset
...

When the candle’s spent and the star is ash in your eyes,
the bell of your heart, an urn of midnight sunflowers,
to the darkness within, say, yes, I was a friend of the fireflies.
...

Free. Not falling, not wounding the herb I’m healed by,
as the stars change, as the nuts and the berries and the acorns
come to the trees, mast for the bears and the boars and the birds,
time, is it time that does this, enlarging the nightsky of my mind,
...