Patrick White Poems

Angry, smashing antiquated croci like Faberge Easter eggs.
The air is rationing its oxygen, and even the wind begs.
I'm holding it all together like an abandoned barn,
but there are flashfloods in the mirror trying to humble
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The night dances with itself like an only child
to the sounds of its own silence
when it thinks no one is watching.
Every falling leaf, a gesture of the hands,
...

Poetry used to live in a forbidden state of courageous grace
But now it's palpably culpable of cowardice.
Paper-mache lifemasks with all the characteristics
Of a gaping sin of omission. As F.R. Scott said of E.J. Pratt
...

in memory of Heidi Clow

What did you see just before you committed suicide?
Did the snake mesmerize the bird that used to sing inside
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You don't come. Your absence is a guillotine. My heart
Plummets from the altitude it risked in looking forward
To a day with you outside of time and circumstance, jumps
From the edge of paradise, the flat earth, the back
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Those nights I went out with a butcher's knife
down the dark alley between our house
and the triplex next door, twelve years old,
my courage running down my leg, to stab
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No muse around, I sit down by the side of the road
and let my solitude inspire me, insights
flashing like unnameable night birds
across the occult intuition of the moon.
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Trying to get centered in the middle of chaos
isn't going to turn me into the third of eye
of a hurricane rose, or square the circle
with the clarity of a lens with a seeing-eye dog.
...

Trying to get centered in the middle of chaos
isn't going to turn me into the third of eye
of a hurricane rose, or square the circle
with the clarity of a lens with a seeing-eye dog.
...

These days, this late at night, I'm usually a lone wolf sage
high above the timberline in a sanctuary of solitude
that occasionally breaks the silence
with the elegaic echo of the anquished shriek of a hawk
...