AZAZEL SAYS

AZAZEL SAYS

Azazel says

if you don’t live it somebody else

is going to end up with your future.

Insert local habitations and names thereof here.

Perth, Ontario. Population six thousand.

From here to Kingston the pioneers did nothing

in the way of land naming but plagiarize Scotland.

But it isn’t less airy here and now

than it ever was anywhere else.

The streetlamps go on like repeating decimals.

Venus hot and bothered in the green tangerine dusk.

And even through the doe-glare of the highway headlights

and the light pollution of those who never look up,

Jupiter in the east above the Smokin’ Eagles Smoke Shop

on Lanark County 10 heading toward Franktown,

the lilac capital of Canada.

You want to know what the doe feels

in front of an oncoming car sometime

look up at the stars and try to make sense of it all.

But that was in Richardson, five miles outside of Perth.

So where are we now?

In deep space?

Or back on earth?

Everybody edgy until the first snow.

Off balance astraddle a snow line

one foot on a summer beach

and the other on an ice-floe.

Hail today and cold.

Ave November.

How now brown cow?

However thick you lay it on

you’ll still look the same in the spring

when the snow’s gone.

The loosestrife and the mustard ruined.

The deer herd culled.

The moose shot, cut up and bled

and wrapped in a brown paper cover

like the meatier parts of a dirty novel.

Brown fields still in a state of denial

with a dirgeful mist hovering over them

like the last few wraiths of chlorine gas

on a few acres along the Somme

that have been allowed to return to nature again

with some enormous deformities

of man woman animal child and land.

The wild herds of pampas grass

have neglected their manes again

and they look like paintbrushes with cowlicks.

There are some fields as neat and predictable

as a pop song two minutes long with a hook.

And then there are the improvised jazz jams

in the drainage ditches along the highway

where the cattails get it on

with whatever weed shows up

in violation of its parole

to take a load off Benny.

Blown out tires, hub caps, roadkill,

and the wild irises in tight indigo nightgowns

who sang their hearts out on heroin

the way Billie Holiday sang the blues on deadly nightshade.

Azazel says

abundance is the root of all desolation.

How fast things age is a measure

of the depths of their disappointment.

You want your cake. You want your cake.

You stuff your mouth.

You blow the candles out

and then the cake eats you.

Life lives to eat itself and be hungry.

Probably true.

But November’s killed its appetite.

Silos like silver bullets way in the distance.

Little monopoly farmhouses

with mythically inflated driveways.

A phalanx of black iron gates

with crests and spears

and two cheesey lions just like those

you’d find outside a bank

that was trying to look imperial.

They’re not farms anymore.

They’re estates

with a Roman legion for gates.

And meanwhile back in town,

the pioneer suburb of Ottawa,

in an upstairs apartment on a back porch

overlooking a deserted parking lot

a nineteen-fifties style burgundy couch

with a bas relief of paisley brocade

abandoned by some weekend hippies

is growing too damp and organic to sit on

and smells like a sweating horse with black mould

the longer it’s left out in the rain.

And there are field mice, not many, a few

like the Roma of Europe

who’ve found a niche in life

among the loose change, nuggets of bud

log jam of unsalvageable cigarettes

in its crevices and crannies,

a selection of old lighters

each with an individual story to tell

and the coiled cartoon springs and stuffing

of an era that liked to round things off

like the bumpers of their cars and couches and women

as if they knew even way back then

they were going to sit for awhile

and look long and hard and hopelessly west

for the sun to come up just once at dusk

in the land of the midnight sun

and prove them right about their point of view.

But the mice don’t really care about

who got the window-seat on the bus

or how much baggage they carried on with them

like the elephant to the south of them.

They’re snug right where they are

and they travel light

happily balanced between security and a fire-escape

like the arsonist in all of us in autumn

as the Canada geese high overhead honk their horns

like the paddy waggons of the Keystone Cops in passing

as they leave the set with probable cause

to bust another marijuana patch like a pot boiler.

Azazel says

forget about the mice

forget about the geese.

The die is cast.

And there’s no turning back now.

Stand on the Gore Street Bridge over the Rideau Canal

and watch how the fish follow the Tay river

in suspended animation

and how the last of the swallows

to inhabit its fieldstones

cross it again and again without hesitation

like the flash of sabres that never clash

gleefully building a nation

like a lot of little holes in the wall

the birds can come back to

with a moat of their own

to frustrate the feral cats

that live under the bridges of Gore street

like famished Fenians on the prowl.

Azazel says

the nations have been unpeopled

by their governments

and data isn’t history

though it took a thousand deaths

from malaria and alcohol-related-on-the-job accidents

to make it what it is today.

Some crushed by falling trees.

Some drowning drunk

trying to swim across the river

to acquisition another bottle of whiskey.

Scarlet fever and childbirth on the farm.

It’s hard to number the miscarriages and still births

these old grey sway-backed arks and barns

that look like the last of the mammoths in the distance

have seen around here.

The nightmare febrile locks of stranded hair

that snaked over the foreheads

of the young wet wives who died

into their second year

of trying to continue a blood line

all the way from Ottawa to Kingston

like the plagiarized names

of all these small towns

that sprang up like stone-mills and water wheels

all along her birth canal.

British half-pay officers in beaver skins

building dams alongside the beavers

as if this were Kandahar, Afghanistan

and tribal Scottish highland chieftains

who ran Renfrew like the Taliban.

People have a way of abstracting

what’s crucial about the stem cells of life

from the sweat and lechery

that went into producing them.

Walking boats like reluctant debutantes

that have been taken under the arm

up and down the stair wells

of a palace of water in high heels.

Spidery horse-drawn carriages on springs

that learned to sing

to the beat of corduroy roads

and keep a decent pleat in their prose.

Imported butlers holding out silver plate

to accept the salutary donations

of the calling cards who dropped in

to see if So and So were as thin

as the last letter she sent them.

People who took a bath in their own grave every day

and left a ring around the tub

like the ripple in the heartwood of a tree

on the growing edge of history.

Who considers the spit on the back of the stamp

that went off to war for king and country

just to have a return address to come back to

like a river you can’t step into twice

even if you were to build

one of the world’s longest canals

with post office boxes in it for the swallows?

Azazel says

it’s casually ironic

that one of the first things these people did

to work all this up

into a life and a home and a heritage of their own

was kill the Algonquin village next door

for having one of its own.

History is a screening myth

to cover up what someone did with the bones.

If they’re sacred, they’re sacred by default.

No one on the bridge disagrees

even when they see

weaving its way like a lifeline among the catfish

a long trail of blood

all the way back to the village.

Brutal to have one people vanguish another

and then turn on its own

out of sympathy

for what it’s just so irreparably damaged.

That’s why I need Azazel around.

I may be the lightning rod.

But he’s the ground.

PATRICK WHITE