MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT

MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT

Mad you must be and delight in it

like mating killdeer in the spring,

lyrical love-making in the epiphanous air

and one flys into the bumper and dies.

Tears flowing down your cheeks

as you drive on into the incomprehensible

horror and silence of the act. And later,

your girlfriend will elaborate the fact

into a beautiful piece of art. Radiance

thrusts a shard of glass through your heart

out of the blue and there you are

with a baffled pain in your eyes

crying on the easel in paint. Poor man.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Revel in the absurd. Logic, the shakey stool

of a man trying to hang himself.

Quicksand cornerstones sinking into a miasma

of conditioned chaos. What does it prove

that would have made a difference to the outcome?

Nothing to stand on anymore. Even less

to lie down for. Nature a postcard.

A recurring calendar. And one of those months,

a close-up of a killdeer in intimate detail.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Uproot your hidden harmonies. Give up

your golden chains. Throw the swill

out of your fountains like wine

from the night before. Ignore your dreams

as the phantasmagoria of sacred clowns.

Everything passes in a riot of stars

before you’re aware of it. Where are they now?

The aerial ballet of the killdeer. Roadkill.

Random encounters with the irrational.

The clarity cruel. The darkness immense.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Stare at the wall until something appears.

An orphan of mirrors. An estranged elopement

trying to get away with it all. Throw

the moon down from the tower first

and after it your skull. The hearse awaits

and the horses are plumed with black feathers.

Space is warped. Time’s corrupt. And the light

isn’t on some kind of goodwill tour.

Over the newly ploughed field,

where are the killdeer that were there

a moment ago, a year, forever, a figment of time?

So beautiful in the way they impressed each other.

First warm day of the spring. Even the silence

overjoyed with the liberation of water

of earth, of sky, as the stitches came out of the wound

and winter, the scar of a worn out topic.

One of those moments it was intense bliss

to be alive on earth, unasked for,

and delightfully irrelevant the reason.

Mad you must be and delight in it

to embrace the crazy wisdom of the incomprehensible

as a spontaneous medium you’re not involved in

except as the one who suffers what you see,

the terror and the lucidity, the rapture, the monotony

and the worst you could imagine it could be,

the abyss, the car, the killdeer, the unreality

of there being no amends for the tragedy

to fall back upon, not even the pity of the poetry

or the beauty of the painting. And the tears?

What of the tears? What are we to make of them?

Water off the wings of the killdeers? Time

just another water clock that heals nothing

it wounds by accident? Annihilations

of the spirit encountering anti-matter?

You can entertain yourself as delusionally sane

by explaining the stars to the stars,

or you can spend hours trying to decipher the scars

like glyphs on the stone calendars that knew

timing revealed the content in the blink of an eye

and in the cherry-sized heart of a bird

smashed against the sun and the sky

flashing off a chrome bumper at 80k,

who knows, a moment before impact,

if it felt it had desecrated the absurdity of the event

by dying inchoately innocent of its own bewilderment.

PATRICK WHITE

ALL THIS STUFF

ALL THIS STUFF

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 the stars that seemed so aloof and untouchable

settling like dust on my eyes.

I want to go home but home itself is gone

and there is no one waiting for me.

I live in these nomadic tents of my breath

that the wind blows through day and night

and everything I touch

though I long for the will of a pyramid

turns into quicksand.

I observe the life within me going on,

this flux of intimate intensities

as if I were no more than the container

and sentient window of a stranger’s house

looking in out of the darkness

of my uninhabitable homelessness

that has always been my last known address.

Nothing is ever what it seems

in this shell-game of themes and memes

that shuffles me around like a hard pea

gullible enough to deceive itself

it might one day turn into

the new moon of a black pearl.

But I’m chained by my vertebrae to a slaver

in a caravan of all my wild sides

being dragged like a jungle

toward these civilized coasts

that put everything asunder

that God has joined together

and brand what they sever

with the savage logos of an enforced belonging

that death is the only escape from.

My private cloud of unknowing

with the occasional black lightning bolt of insight

that sets my roots on fire

so that the whole tree becomes its own funeral pyre

and sheds me in flames.

And trying to fit me like a shoe

to the newly washed foot of God

is a vain waste of time for both of us

when you’re life’s got a hole in it

I keep patching with poems in the cold

or keep stopping along the way to take off

and dump out the pebble of the world

I’m walking on with a limp.

And it’s as foolish for a river

to ask where its youth has gone

as it is for me to lament the passage of mine

that I sent on up ahead like water

to keep something flowing behind me.

I don’t look for grey hairs in the wind

when it’s as clear as grace

that time and space

don’t encroach upon the stars like cataracts

and everyone we’ve ever been

lives on in each of us forever

like water waiting in the open mouth

of the frozen moonskull

for me to swallow and thaw

so that the blossom can flesh the dead branch again

that trembles and bends before the wishing well

that all men drink from like a bell

in this mirage of fire in a desert of stars

to taste the lightning-tongued elixirs of life

that frees the serpent from its scars

like a discarded straitjacket of skin and pain

to go witching for water in hell again.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT CHAINS WE RATTLE

WHAT CHAINS WE RATTLE

What chains we rattle in our own emptiness.

The void gnashes its teeth to dust. Is there love

Anywhere that I’m worthy of?

I want to scream in this straitjacket of anti-matter

but you are not here; your person is absent;

so I scream into this paper ear;

I abandon my own blood, turn red white

in my fear of losing you, witnessing your anger,

the small glaciers that inch through my heart

like ice-ages. Maybe I’m crazy, maybe I’m old,

maybe I’m burnt out, maybe all these words

I throw at you mean absolutely nothing to you

or to anyone else, or even me, but there you have it.

I’m sloughing my old skin like a star-riddled universe

and I don’t know what I’m turning into.

When I want to know who I am I look at your face.

Lately I’ve felt like some kind of eclipse, some darkness

growing like fungus on the light. A leper in sunshine.

Am I broken glass; the black mirror, shattered? I mistake you

often; looking for you in every shard and splinter of my being

but the shadows are too young to give birth to stars

and you can’t seem to give me the reassurance I need

to return the moon to the goblet it fell from.

It’s not so much that I doubt you but that

the affirmations that should be anvils under the burning swords

crumble under the hammer-blows of the heart.

There is no fire in the answers; only the hiss

of metal cooling in black water. Now maybe I’m gone forever

and maybe you’re some bridge collapsing under its own weight

and we’re both acting too indignant to be honest,

but I feel a hole in me the size of darkness

and a silence that dreams like God. Are you still there; am I?

Have I woken up without you?

Burn for me, baby; fire all these love-crossed stars up

and let me see you shining and naked on the nightwatch.

I’m tired of issuing all these secret passwords

to an army of spies scrambling clarity in a coding machine.

Perhaps I’m not clear myself or haven’t done or said it right,

or there are lies standing-by like unfueled flights to nowhere,

but I feel like my heart’s been through a paper-shredder

and there are foreign troops entering the office with orders

to exterminate anyone not already in pieces

or out dancing around the fire at a book-burning. I know you’re young;

I know your eyes would have to turn into skies

and your heart, the Hubble telescope,

for you to see me as I am to myself, an infinitely remote galaxy,

the faint smudge of a billion stars and planets

evaporating like breath on a cold windowpane into the void.

A match blown out. Forgive me. I am the light, unmoored, an empty boat

drifting through my own wreckage,

looking for survivors among a feeding frenzy of fins,

all my useless modifiers dangling in shark-infested waters.

I can’t even remember what I died in the name of

if anything at all

or who among all these bodies I’ve hauled into my heart

brought me back to life

if it wasn’t you.

But how ridiculous. Two hours to make love;

five and a half until you call

or don’t call after our exchange with healing or hurt.

Why am I always the one who is waiting?

You always the one who seems to be labouring

under some onerous imposition?

You’re little boxes of wind, back-alley gusts of being,

lifting me up a moment like a leaf

and then off to something else with a gust of indifference.

No sooner do I crawl out from under

these heavy Himalayas of heart-mud

that avalanche down upon me

with every telling remark you don’t make, the opening for tenderness

missed again and again by your smouldering silence

then I find myself washed clean of myself

in one of your dry wells of emotion. Do you truly love me

or have I become some fading mirage in this black Sahara

that bares its teeth like pyramids?

And yes, and yes, and yes; I know I am not perfect. I do not think I’m god

unless you and him and her and the daylilies are too.

And if it’s a revolution, a coup d’etat you seek

in the secret cells of your mind; remember, it’s your own palace

you’re overthrowing, your own window you smash.

There is nothing in me or my life

that is not already yours by an immaculate contract of stars.

I feel like a bottle of aged whiskey must feel

when it’s been drained to the last drop

and the drinker isn’t even tipsy. Have I failed with you

in some essential way that keeps the drunken dancers out of the garden,

the mystic lovers like wildflowers

who have eluded the conforming vases enduring on the mantlepiece?

I love you so much every bit of your seeming unhappiness,

your frustrated, frustrating petulance

is a wound I stitch up with my spinal cord, the ashes of an eye

that falls into the dense atmosphere of my planetary heart like a meteor.

When I’m angry, be certain; it’s only a wave

in a measureless sea of devotion, weather squalling the surface of the mirror,

but in the depths, my love of you is law,

however the wind blows open the pages of the book of the moon,

however my name is erased from the water it’s written on

even by your hand warping my reflection on the midnight lakes

of your tempestuous seeing.

I shape my body for you. I cajole my hair.

I scrape worlds from under my fingernails

and liberate the life that has lain dormant therein for aeons

in your honour, dedicating each first dawn of creation to your smile.

The golden marrow of my genius is worthless to me

except that it nourishes you in a market of one.

And I am happy to be the nothing that is added to you

so that it amplifies you over and over again by ten. Zero

was ever in love with one since before the beginning of time.

As I love you in this endless succession of an unmoving infinitely finite now.

I want to be your white voice, your green heart,

your black blood, the sky that catches you like a bird when you fall.

Do you see me? I’m standing here rooted to the earth

like a tree that’s been gutted by your slow lightning

and yet still puts out leaves like eloquent tongues,

each one whispering you into the song of the other. My heart

is unquenchably yours like a star that turns its light inward

so that it can’t be detected by anyone else.

Maybe we’re doomed by circumstance and disposition, age

and essence, and maybe we’re not, but even in the denying of love

you are the hidden harmony that affirms it.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN STILL HEAR THE RETICENT ECHOES

I CAN STILL HEAR THE RETICENT ECHOES

I can still hear the reticent echoes

of my wary adolescence among intellectual radicals

demanding the nightwatchmen of insight open the gates.

One stole an Underwood for me from the student newspaper,

saying I would put it to better use than they would

and another drove me to my astronomy exam

against the will of my drunken declinations.

And I remember White Rabbit playing on the radio

first time, and the turmoil of sun and morning shadows

playing Scarlatti on the keyboards of the arbutus leaves.

Happy. Free. And sixteen enough to get away with anything.

I was bright and fearless. No one could take subjective risks

the way I could, but I still had to stand up

on the book of experience to see over the steering wheel.

Spectral figments of the past, smokey remnants

of the fires we once sat around without giving a thought

to how long they’d last. We were zodiacs. We were

hedonists of the light, trying to believe

in our own arrogance enough to roar like dragons

and write like the first green tendrils of an ancient vine.

I was apprenticed to the signs I saw in everything

like a library of eyes in flames, and the subtlety of fireflies

that came like the nuances of midnight,

and shone upon my path like lighthouses among the stars.

Famous days. Baby turtles urgent to reach the tide

among swarms of hovering seagulls, sky rats,

thinning the odds of any of us ever making it

out of the shadows of our predatory circumstances.

Everything a test of our fitness for life, and a laurel

awarded randomly to the luckiest if not the most talented.

Genius was mean and cruel and scoffed

at the slightest adage of the pretentious fool

that published on the back of sententious matchbooks

but at night, in its writing window, overlooking

the lights of the town, it took off its war face

and summoned the moon to a tender seance

like a medium in love with the ghost of a muse

that was playing hard to get. O the fallacious brilliance

of our teaching errors. The illustrious craving

for dangerous love affairs with thresholds and taboos

that had never been crossed or broken before.

Did a knife ever sink into the heart

as deeply as those we fell upon

to discipline ourselves in the black arts

of our tragic flaws? All our fire pits

smothered in ashes by grieving women

who really meant it, though we were too depressed

to see them scattering our urns on the wind

to ceremoniously exorcise the feelings they had left for us.

Leave things as a token of what they are,

like stars light years ahead of themselves

plummeting into the darkness of the black holes

that lay ahead like hourglasses that would invert their souls

and leave them on the receiving end of their own hindsight.

Let the mirages deceive the deserts of the moon

into believing they were the ambassadors of watersheds

that could green a sea of shadows with wishing wells.

Permissive in my joys, it didn’t hurt to be sparing in hell.

Something infernally elegant about compassion in a demon.

I wrote like a carillon of apostate bells, and books

began to appear on the staves of library shelves

like night birds in a museum, singing to themselves.

My life in art back then. A lucid agony of embryoes

curled up with their knees under their chins

like fossil question marks in encyclopedic shale

that preserved them like the juvenalia of my first attempts

to write about life as if deep in its heart

it secretly exceeded it own table of contents

in a hidden harmony of alternative endings.

Exotic exits from homely entrances,

after every poetry reading more people

felt like poppies than they did like wheat.

And I could see I’d made a good impression

on the death masks of the scarecrows

as I threshed the harvests I had sown

under a new moon of well-seasoned potential

that I shared with the birds like sunflowers at zenith

not earthworms in the starmud of a walled garden.

O delirious moment that counterpoints the past

reduced to the absurdity of recounting it

for the trivialities it turned on like microcosmic gates

that escaped our notice, but made all the difference

in the elaborate depths of the outcome.

A stolen typewriter in the hands of a radical friend.

PATRICK WHITE

GENTLE THE STARS AND THE TOWN ASLEEP

GENTLE THE STARS AND THE TOWN ASLEEP

Gentle the stars and the town asleep.

No stranger at the gate. No door ajar.

The windows deep in their own affairs.

Flowers thicken the hot night air

with pheromones of sex and death

that follow you all the way down the street

like homeless kittens and lonely junkies.

Walking my solitude off alone,

the cold stone of the moon overhead,

the first night bird I’ve heard tonight

singing high in the leaves of an elm

strung like a guitar with power lines

and in my heart, a child of longing,

the half-finished spectre of a poem to you.

The streetlamps bud like day lilies

but nothing blooms in the tungsten light

though insects gather in impotent frenzies,

my poem to you makes love through its eyes

to the leaf and the star and the stone

seeking out images of you to adorn

this figment of desire in a shrine of thorns.

A woman dreams in a house far away.

The road grows darker and longer

out among the fields where the stars

wax brighter than the themes of a poet

igniting like fireflies down by the river

he sits by nursing his imagination

on the night shift of the inconceivable.

PATRICK WHITE

THE YOUNG POETS TELL ME I'M OLD

THE YOUNG POETS TELL ME I’M OLD

The young poets tell me I’m old.

The old poets tell me I’m young.

Is it done, then, the work, time to let the sun go down?

Evaporate? Scatter my ashes among the stars

and out wait the eras to shine again?

Or is there still enough within me to immolate,

Take a firefly like the heater of a cigarette

and kiss the fuses of the supernovas, the wicks

of the unlit candles? I don’t feel dead

though I try my extinction on several times a day

to see if it fits yet, if I’ve grown my way into it.

What the river gives up in speed, in flashing

down the heights of its sharp-edged peaks,

its supple effervescence, it more than makes up for

in the mass and the depth of its movement.

Yesterday, a snowflake on a furnace. Today

an encyclopedic glacier greased by its own melting

all the way to the sea. Yesterday, bright vacancy.

Today, dark abundance. And the days and the nights,

this keyboard at my fingertips, the blacks and the whites

of these eighty-eights, is it time to stop playing

and bury it like the spinal column of unknown fossil?

The only pillar of the temple I could never tell

if I were building up or tearing down. Time now

a waterclock of ice, and frost on the garden?

When the wine is asleep in a dark cellar,

what does it dream? Does it remember

the bitter, green grapes, or the headiness of the red?

Does the watershed recall the fountain giddy with birds

or is the goblet empty, the hourglass left overturned,

the full-fledged sunlight dropped its flight feathers?

Assessment. My eyes are cracked like two year old

dry red oak. But they’ll keep you warm in the winter.

I have a ten thousand dollar smile that always has

a little hook of compassionate irony in it, and my crowns

are aligned like the zodiacs of Etruscan kings,

but it’s not out to catch anything, it’s not baleen,

and it’s never been a blue whale skimming krill.

Broke my nose, shattered my elbow, punctured my lungs,

splintered my instep, my right hand fractured and rewired

so many times it’s a necklace of puka shells

and the knuckles have all been punched back

from the Himalayas into the Appalachians.

And my skin is a cuneiform of scars,

a Proto-Nostratic alphabet, a stone calendar

of Mayan glyphs, a stamped passport

to the external world, the used condom

of a horned viper, a bag of water with nine holes in it

that has been shot through like a country mailbox

on the side of the road in passing, the parchment

of a gnostic gospel that’s leathered in the sand

a long time in a dark cave waiting for a goatherd.

My left eye has a black spider brooched to it

like a sloppy gunsight, the skeleton of an umbrella

from a partially detached retina. I grew up

with earthquakes, so I don’t shake when the earth moves.

I don’t drool, mutter, or flare an ear like a conch shell

to hear what the sea is saying. Sleep like the dead,

no dreams when I’m writing, and body still tight

and muscled enough to give the snarling crackheads pause

on a Saturday night outside the Shark and Bull,

and when I put it in black leather like a rat snake

I still feel like a famous eclipse in the moonlight.

Heart still a meteor that breaks its own rules

when I see a beautiful woman. Don’t drink.

I make my own sugars. So my liver and kidneys

are still donatable, and to judge from my last lover

still got a lingham to put a smile on the face of a yoni,

a jewel in the lotus, something Freudian in my slips,

and I haven’t forgotten how to encounter the lips of an orchid.

Smoke too much, but I’ve got a canary in my lungs

that lets the miners know when things

are getting too toxic. Wino of the coffee bean,

black, pure protein, but my nerves remain titanium

and I hear now, despite the excoriations of the past,

it’s a great antioxidant against Alzheimer’s

and people are eating crow like hot asphalt

on their doctor’s advice, and I’m not going to die

of a terrorist heart attack waiting for me up the road

like an i.e.d. without a bomb disposal unit.

Too bad, I would have taken a lot of them with me.

But on the apples of my love, no blight. On the sacred shrouds

of my indecipherable sorrows, no stain. My loyalty

still as suicidal as it’s ever been. My anger

still as focused as a laser and my indignation

at the pettiness, meanness, hypocrisy of my peers

still an early savage flint knapping obsidian spears.

Is the spring really a younger season than the fall

and the sum of autumn’s fallibility, the experience

the spring’s apprenticed to? Not likely, but my wonder

at just being here, doesn’t know what year it is.

My vices aren’t grey. My virtues are still as estranged

as they ever were. And even after fifty years of writing poetry

I still haven’t cracked the koan of my solitude

though I can juggle twelve thoughts in my mouth at once

and say what I mean, without hoping to be understood.

Didn’t have a middle-aged crisis. Maybe I wasn’t

all that important, or maybe everything’s been such a crisis

from the very beginning, I didn’t have time

to look up and notice. And younger women

haven’t been unkind, nor the older ones unmindful

of my boyish charms. And as for my spirit, the lightning

still hasn’t asked the fireflies for a starmap

and my human divinity hasn’t gone crawling to the gods yet,

but there have been moments that lavished felicitous eras

of mauve New England asters in a bolt of morning sunlight

in early September under an apple tree when all I could do

was stare transfixed at how perennially startling

the brevity of the beauty of the earth can actually be.

So my seeing hasn’t aged. Nor my imagination

flaked like paint off the flowers. And I swear

the return journey is a lot more innocent than the first.

Being is time. It isn’t something happening to you

from the outside. It emanates from your heart

and when the lucky day comes you see it’s all now

and in every moment, a whole new universe

flashing out of the void and returning to it

like the pulse of the dawn after dusk after dawn,

and the past is creative and the future’s already

been achieved, and death is not a reason, it’s an art,

how can it not be San Francisco, 1966, as well

as all the regrets you’re going to have about it tomorrow,

when you’re the radiant and the watershed

and the fountain time flows from resplendently

from the seed to the root to the leaf to the flower

and back to the fruit in a tree ring of water,

a sun dog of light, you can’t run from, you can’t

catch up to. Because you’re the sundial, you’re

the waterclock, you’re the pocket-watch, you’re

the hour in its prime just hitting its stride

and you’re the eternity with one toe over the starting line.

PATRICK WHITE

COULD I BREATHE THE STARS

COULD I BREATHE THE STARS

Could I breathe the stars, I would expire in light.

Were I the harvest moon, I would retract my claws.

Were my heart anything other than what it is,

I would be a windfall of silver apples burnished by crows

and not this rag of a man with a mouthy wound.

I would not be this perversion of radiance mutating

in these acephalic mirrors warped by shape-shifting space.

I would see clearly the angry red berries of the hawthorn

and adopt them as a solar system. And think I was blessed.

And, o yes, spiky woman, when love was in eclipse

if I were not so afraid of falling upon you like a sword,

I would notch the moon like a gunsight

with its own valleys and mountains,

and let the light shine through like Bailey’s Beads,

and place it on your head like a laurel of fire,

the enlightened corona of a door I’ve left ajar.

You agitate the spiders in their morning webs

into vibrating like the needles of sewing machines

or the clappers of fire alarms, as the sun

takes the pulse of its dreamcatchers,

looking for signs of life from the night before.

I am a creature of darkness. I know the abyss.

It fills you like a universe you just can’t seem

to get your heart and arms around.

It’s bigger than the wingspan of your spirit,

the one vacuum nature doesn’t abhor.

No end of it. No beginning you can hope for.

You embody the impersonality of it intimately.

The dark mother of the abounding stars

whose beauty adds an edge to the emptiness

that keeps you from pleading for oblivion

in an isolation deeper than the dead.

The irises were surgically removed from your eyes

and you’re out looking for rainbows at night with a match.

But there’s no one to keep your promises to,

and just at the bend in the river, where you laid

a poppy on the grave of the white crow

to pay your respects to the end of the road,

you plunge over the edge of a finger-pointing precipice

like a willow of water into an ocean of awareness

and there’s no one there to catch you. And the dreamcatchers

aren’t the safety nets they said they were.

Were I a witchdoctor that knew the antidote to love

I would come with strange concoctions

of the Pleiades and deadly nightshade

ground with a sexual pestle in the mortar of my skull

and spiced with a measure of the inconceivable

and have you rise from your death bed

like a miracle among roses that escaped the frost.

I’d stroke the back of your hand like the head of a swan.

And you’d feel it melting like ice. The moon would bloom

like a love letter delivered to a dead branch.

The nightmare of the dispassionate fever

would transmutate into an elixir of life

that would thrill every flower into believing they had

lightning for roots. Wondrous blossoms of insight.

Into the Open. Into the Absence, the nihilistic emptiness

of the cup poured out in a hemorrhage of the heart

when the wine went bad. Someone there in the doorway

gone like a shadow from the sundial of the farewell

they left you with like the wing of a bird

that doesn’t sing anymore in the morning.

And even the birch groves don’t feel very strong

when they’ve been cast down by an ice storm

into white canes and crutches of suffering

you once could lean on for emotional support.

I would be a lightbulb in a house well for you

to keep you from freezing and more grandiosely

if I were a pagan architect, I would erect a temple

with pillars of fire for you that even time

when its hair grows out like solar flares

couldn’t pull down in a fury of indignant ions.

There would be no lack of heretics, martyrs,

or Norse gods to sing in your flames

because they would have finally found something

greater than their solipsistic selves to sacrifice to

that consumes them with devotion

axially aligned with you. And wherever you walked

true north would be under your feet.

As it is I follow you like an oriflamme

in a pageant of longing I will not be ransomed from.

And even if the court jester to the queen

isn’t the grand marshal that gets to carry it,

the one who rides first in the wake of your love,

his armour burning like a mirror of your reflected fire,

I have raised a small banner of blood

on the lance of a thorn the white knights

would think was laughably burlesque

were it not for the fact that it pours out of a dragon’s eyes

like the eclipse of a black rose in tears

igneously bleeding in the darkness

to temper its fangs like swords it remits in tribute,

from a burning bridge of fireflies,

to the solitary river of the unhonoured waters of the moon.

PATRICK WHITE