Patrick White Poems

When I turn the night around in this lonely room
where a thousand books hang like a footnote on the silence
or buckets above the wells of life
from which they cannot drink, sounds we make in the dark
...

Not to be practical, not
to mean, be, do,
no more than the wind
to insist upon itself, to
...

Autumn swings its bell like an eyelid over my heart
and in the penumbral umbrellas that bloom
in a garden of eclipses and sundials,
I discuss you with an enlightened ghost
...

Snow on the eyelids of the pine-cones.
Zen pagodas, meditating. Snow
on the withered stars of the wild rose hips
attaining the unattainable like Buddha
...

Full moon behind the broken femur of a jack pine
shattered by the wind on the ridge of the hill,
its pagoda of boughs, nothing but a lean-to now
for deer mice, fox, rabbit, groundhogs.
...

One day you realize you're looping,
Mars retrograde in Virgo,
through all the stations in life
you once progressed through,
...

Sometimes the clarity comes too late
to realize there was never
any need for forgiveness
and nothing to expiate
...

A fluctuation in the cosmic void,
a wink of atoms,
a fallen eyelash of light,
the seeing of a lifetime
...

As if beyond death today,
as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,
the echo of my heart
pumping shadows
...

All day the sun ripens the grape;
all night the wine ripens the cup,
a carrying forth into a carrying forth
of fruit into fruit, sun to grape,
...