Patrick White Poems

All these bottles with s.o.s. inside
but not a genie in a lamp among them.
Occasionally the Cutty Sark
in a forty pounder of whiskey,
...

When I get to the root of what I really want
it all comes down to the nothing that I've got.
If a mirror were to publish me the way I really look,
I'd look like a rootless tree, scattering all its leaves
...

When grief grows savage and there's nothing to hunt
and all your mandalas are turning back into cave paintings
running down a limestone wall like spears
in the tears of weeping shamans, and you want
...

Eyes in the shadows, in blood, in space, incubating the light
that has yet to be born, wild asters in the deflowered fields of death,
and the return of the living out of the eyeless abyss, delinquent,
and a redness in the air of this September night,
...

And should it come time to speak of the sadness
that reaches fruition in the medicine bag of the heart,
don't bring a teacher that can't heal by singing and dancing
to the wounded discipline of a lost art that's gone
...

Barley moon, tonight. Hurt deeply but don't know why.
The threshers and the raccoons and soon the Canada geese
have already done their work, so there's nothing to harvest
but a few cobs and kernels of cattle corn that look like
...

Yes, the awful thresholds.
The taboos of lace and razorwire
that threshed our blood like kings of the waxing year,
queens that were crowned like the full moon in broken windows.
...

Sitting here becoming whatever drifts my way.
Cedar boughs smouldering in an attic to smoke the bats out.
Thought-watching without looking for the answer to anything.
Spiders like badges walking on the waters of my mind.
...

Narcissus lost his face in the mirror he stored his image in
while Lady Nightshade was saying grace over the wrong coffin
rats from the shipwreck were rowing ashore
in the last lifeboat with a trapdoor in it for an emergency exit.
...

Just want to stay inside. Don't want to see anybody.
Don't want to be anybody. Just want to forget for awhile
that I exist. I'm sick of being besieged behind my eyelids
by a hundred thousand ghosts all gibbering at me
...