Patrick White Poems

Moment to moment, is this my afterbirth
or afterlife? Old, or sixty-five years young?
What nebulae does my breath make
on the window of life, cold and diminishing?
...

Grey inside and out. October rain.
How much darkness can a room contain?
Not much left to let go of. The glory
of the yellow elm across the street
...

at three in the morning on a deserted highway. I know
some of you think you’re on top of this, but look again,
for all the applause that follows you around like an encore
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I had to walk beside a lot of rivers,
miles, lightyears, trying not to impale myself
on a mace of dead trees or be swept
down a bank of slippery starmud
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Whenever I remember you. Heartwood knots.
And the birds go silent. After all these years
of trying to flower my way to fruition in the light
of the effortless vision that’s been the engine
...

When there was wine in the gourd, not vinaigrette,
and we didn’t put a brown paper bag
like an executioner’s hood over the bottle
we drank from each other’s skull like an sos.
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The relentless indifference of the world
to the monkeys who think they’re in charge.
How does a human skull not rot like a feral dog’s
killed by wolves? Babies die like a carillon
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And I wonder and I wonder and I wonder
even in the midst of this harvest of wheat,
this windfall of apples, the siloes of the sun
full, and this blue moon coming back on
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I could have been what you wanted me to be.
You would have hated it. The windows
would have burst out laughing and the mirrors
would have followed suit. I wasn’t
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The rain makes the night look blacker.
Wet anthracite. Panthers and lacquer.
...