Patrick White Poems

Imagine me being here now this very moment just as I am slipping through my own disembodied awareness like a silver dolphin alone in a sea of shadows on the moon on the eyeless side of the mirror. s you must undergo like the sea enduring its own weather.
...

for Sally

The painting finished, I sit at my desk
and go on painting windows and computer screens.
...

Out here alone so late at night
with all these spectacular stars
burning through the clean glass
of the freezing winter air
...

IN THAT SLUM OF A NEIGHBOURHOOD

In that slum of a neighbourhood
you were the Butterscotch Man.
...

So far down this road
without a destination
my childhood doesn't
recognize me anymore.
...

Silence here, long whispers of moonlight
suggesting things invisible appear,
occult constellations I read in reverse
on the chilly night air. Wildflowers
...

I look into people's faces
and I see the same wound
under many different scars.
...

Noise seeping into the silence.
The apartment groans, cracks it knuckles.
The gas furnace flares, a poppy, a matchbook,
and as things heat up, the tin pipes
...

The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way,
a star without planets shining into the inhuman solitude
that receives everything without distinction or caste
like mountains toppling into the valleys that shadowed their rising
...

Lost, but deliberately so, and every bridge a contradiction,
the water walking on me, and the stars
fingering this abacus of planets with emergency dial-tones,
celestial spheres with lunar polyps on their vocal cords,
...