Patrick White Poems

I miss you like a burn victim misses his face, misses the sky he used to wear like skin. I think I'm dying tonight; Friday night, wandering from unfinished room to unfinished room, trying on coffins, looking at death in the shedding mirrors, wondering what my life has amounted to, a raindropp in the desert,
...

I have never said to anyone that I loved them
and not meant stars, not meant soft green lanterns, not
meant the light coming out of the dark
and fireflies on a windy summer night by a black lake
...

My back aching like the sky goddess Nut doing yoga
over a sidereal painting that's burning like a bridge.
I've been many kinds of fool before, some just silly, some profound
but this is the work of a sacred clown hemorrhaging in the heavens
...

I turn out the lights and lie down to sleep
and you open up within me like a lotus of fire
blooming in the darkness of a vast inner space
that has become my only skin, tattooed with stars
...

All this stuff going on in my head all the time.
All my fixed constellations changing like fireflies.
All the burning ladders of my unsuccessful siege of heaven
lying down like crosswalks at the feet of the mob.
...

And this is the end of the road, this is the cul de sac,
and this is the white root of the black wick,
and this is the last relic in the bone-box of the heretic
who questioned what life is and went up in flames,
...

In moonlight and rubber boots I loved you.
Ladies of the Lake who came like waterlilies
into my life and cast your dark sexual mysticism
over the latest initiate to pass through your veils
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Awake as the dawn approaches, my cat
curled up on the desk beside me in her liferaft of a bed,
three goldfish sleeping at the bottom of their tank.
Ashen-blue in the urn of a sky burial wounding space
...

wild and beautiful, astonishing as the stars
through an open window, simple and stylish
as a single-petalled rose, amorous as
a strawberry as brash as it was shy,
...

The long, dark night, more anthracite
than bituminous. And one star, alone,
fierce above the town, burning, as a jetliner
blinks its way down to landing in Ottawa.
...