Patrick White Poems

I'll wear this robe like a desert;
and release the hinges on the gate
that is closing like a rib cage
on the heart of the nightbird
...

It isn't that I'm looking for eagles in a barnyard
or a phoenix in a match-head
when I observe
by the number of wrecks on the rocks
...

Deep in the night that shells its husk of blue
to pan the nuggets of its stars from a darker stream,
the heart an executioner with a fistful of pardons,
and the soft, moist, lulling of the evening air,
...

It's good to know you're there;
though the world is a diatribe
of waltzing trains and threshing razors,
...

And it shall no more be given to me
than it is to another to understand you if I could
or you, for that matter, shining above the dark wood
as if it didn't matter where your light fell or upon whom.
...

I see you in the eyes of the rain
and in the broken aspirations of the swallow
that hit the windowpane dead on.
Fire that no longer burns.
...

Undevoted, free, and wild,
no one to answer to, no one to answer for,
the urns shattered, and the ashes scattered,
and the fire liberated to perfect its own combustion
...

A thing is adapted to its fate. Not a hair's difference between it and what happens to it. No distinction. Not so us who have eyelids. No perfect equanimity in our stillness. My empty blue glass skull on the windowsill pities the oceans of commotion in my head. The way, when I ruminate, it's always as if I'm living out of a suitcase full of dead flowers. And now you come to me unasked with your platter of poetry, your feast for the dead, and even among spirits you enforce your evangelism about tobacco, and all I can see on the snow plains of your plate, is a few clear cut shrubs of parsley. What did Horace say, Terence, this is stupid stuff. Lettuce-soup. Holy water from the aquifer of the last blister you had a bad love affair with.

And I see you've gone and educated your indifference at a higher institution of learning. Did you get a nose bleed in the ivory tower? Did the capitalists poach it on the way to kill an elephant and saw through the tusks of the moon like a logging company? Did you gather around the death bed of distinguished shipwrecks and pluck the gold earrings from their lobes like heritage jewellery they wanted to be buried with? Was that a seance or an exorcism? More an exorcism I should think, because even the ghosts have been driven off by how antiseptic everything you write is. So many poets like that these days, they lay out their lines like scalpels, mirrors, mouthwash and toe-tags, all unwrapped from a Dead Sea Scroll of clean cotton, a page of twenty-pound number two book paper, as if they were about to perform an operation, but these surgeons can't stand the sight of blood, so nothing ever happens. No one ever gets cut, healed, mended, or pronounced dead. Or even a scar worth buying someone a drink for.
...

I should lie in the sun and melt into the grass.
I listen to the bikers throttling up like chain-saws.
I sit here urgently trying not to pollute time.
A poem's got one foot on shore and one in the boat.
...

Drifting on a drab Sunday in Perth among the ashtrays and leftover sublimities of the church bells. My studio window above the rooftops a smear of willow and wet pine undulating gently in the stillness that followed the rain. Wolves on the easel, waiting to pay the rent. May of the fifth year into the twenty-first century, fifty-six, I sit in a blizzard of tobacco crumbs because I'm too poor to buy tailor-mades, coughing at the computer, wiping small drops of water like pygmy tears from the Cyclopean eye of the screen that glows with the same effulgence as the dirty sheet of the sky. The main migrations are over, but maybe these words are rosaries of late-returning birds. Two anthracite, boat-tailed grackles on a branch just beyond the grimy glass and a gust of sparrows chirrup like squeaky alternator-belts, manically elated in the wake of the storm that has just passed. My freedoms are more sober, my resurgencies probably less profound than the gray roses I give birth to here at my desk, waiting for one of these terminal urgencies of insight to sway me like a bell.

Maybe Louise later today with her Cola and cassettes, and her rough, voluptuous, laughing humanity scorning the random acids of the vulgar world that schools her, a muse who doesn't take requests, a generous longing that's been through a lot. So I sublimate the root-fires of my leafless batons into an auto-de-fe of white canes tired of trying to tap their way through a maze of sexual creeds, blind. The result? A novel and dozens of poems apples above the worms. And I keep her cats, Morgan and Rain, mother and kitten almost fully grown. There are no humans Louise loves more.
...