Patrick White Poems

Holding it in, the pain, the doubt, the solitude.
Caging my wild heart out in the open where the stars live,
and the bars are all on the inside like toppled pillars
still holding up the friezes of a few high ideals as much
...

Now halcyon seas, the Kingfisher Star, Alcyone.
No sign of ever having drowned here. Most
are as unaware of the sentient space they're immersed in
as a fish is of the water it wears like skin
...

There are neon vacancies in our squalid eyes
and letters missing from our garish names
that eloped like snakes in the night
with a bridal catalog of juvenile trains.
...

In certain moods I think like an ice age,
relentless, every insight, the glacier
of a window on the move that cuts like a diamond.
I'm not sentimental about baby mammoths
...

I like the feel of the new heels on my cowboy boots.
I like the feel of breathing in joy like oxygen,
of moving from one small joy to another
without pomp or pageantry
...

The black angel in my blood tells me it's time to die, go, disappear
from myself into the next loveless oblivion
like rainwater down a snake's hole. The black angel
in my heart laughs and reminds me how worthless I am
...

Long day painting by myself down by the lake
where I used to paint with you many years ago,
and now your absence haunts my solitude
as I grey my greens with cool alizarin red
...

Evaporating in a black fire.
Don't want to drink the night from the window again.
Won't be a chain trying to escape itself
when I'm already free,
...

To see the glee in your eyes at eighty
as if you were about to achieve something as big
as you did at three.
And you, there, shy one, freaky adolescent
...

Late spring snow on its way.
Dead ochres and colourless greys
that have never heard of the impressionists.
It's a landscape
...