Patrick White Poems

Soft liberation going on underground
as if someone left the gate to my heart open
and the horses are grazing in sidereal pastures
and there’s no turmoil in the wind blowing
...

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.
...

When you look at a star
can you see
how the night leaves
the intimate doors
...

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
...

And I love it out here this far into my solitude
where the stars are as high and holy and out of reach
as they always were
and everything that is finished irrelevant or gone to waste
...

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

I long for words that don’t exist;
I long for a light
that my eyes have never flowered in before,
but hope is a gravedigger
...

Crossing the river on thin ice, the next step
the beginning, and the one after that
the end and the whole of the rest of your life.
I’m listening for cracks in a mirror.
...

Mauled by the infidel lions of savage hope;
my voice looking for its wings in the ashes of heroic doves
who were immolated like love letters
in my chronic cremation of the world that scorned me like a seed
...