Patrick White Poems

And it's not hard to see I'm wandering in a dry abyss
trying to squeeze tears as readily out of the stars as the desert
that turns everything that lives here into a chronic exile.
Don't know if I'm talking to a mirage, a reflection of some
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for Rebekah Genevieve-Dolorese Garland

Even when life sometimes seems like a black hole,
a dark furnace full of the ashes of burnt roses,
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Weary of the world tonight. Can't stand the lies.
Some drunk loud-mouth out on the street
wants all the girls to know he's there,
My noise is bigger than your noise.
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Since I was a child, this longing in my heart
for something I can't even name, but keeps
drawing me into it like a unfulfilled abyss,
unattainably alluring, but the space
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Won't mean much if your eyes aren't open in your blood.
If the stars can't see you because you don't know how
to read them poetry in the small cafes of your heart
accompanied by spoons and plates and broken goblets
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I could bring you a shattered windowpane,
I could bring you a musical whip that's been trained
to read the stops of your flute
and how your fingers move like windproof spiders.
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And this night that is ending,
bruising into the blue of an impossible rose,
and the windows opening their eyes to the light
that pales the stars from the sky like dreams;
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Living on a planet that kills more people than it heals.
And the most dangerous of predators, our own ideals
turning on us like ingrown hairs, solar flares the wind
blew in our faces without any of the veils or auroral graces
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Pure intensity. The point of a star. Blue acetylene
to burn out the slag of the soul and burnish the gold
that pours from the ore like the full moon out of the new
without any fear of ever growing old.
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Mostly sad. Long dolorous drops of molten bells
tired of calling the faithful to prayer
and the cannon getting all of the attention.
No particular beef with life and only a few in it.
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