TAKING AN UPBEAT FLAMBUOYANT APPROACH TOWARD CATASTROPHE

TAKING AN UPBEAT FLAMBUOYANT APPROACH TOWARD CATASTROPHE

Taking an upbeat flambuoyant approach toward catastrophe.

A good attitude to go on perishing by.

Adept at it.

Like Atlantis happy enough

if it can find a horizon

let alone a lifeboat on it.

Been doing it my whole life.

Because more than once I’ve contended

for and against myself

I was born fortunately too stupid to be a cynic.

Optimism is the heaviest cross of all to bear

up a hill of skulls stacked there by Mongols

who wanted to know if the myth of Sisyphus

were true or not and somehow got my apostasy

mixed up with his

and mistakenly crucified the absurd

on top of Mt. Sumeru, the world mountain,

to get the city of God to surrender without a fight.

I’m the last two apocryphal commandments

that were driven out into the desert

like the twin scapegoats

of the baker’s dozen

and the carpenter’ inch

when the other ten went metric.

Love a lot and you’ll know what to do

without being told to.

Or, option B, heed none of the above

and take your chances

freelancing out along the razor’s edge

like an ice breaker

looking for a northwest passage through your throat.

Pretty radical for a rootless tree like me

who didn’t set out in life to be

the rolling stone that kicked off an avalanche

like a slow boy playing toe-hockey with a mountain

on a thatched road on his way home from night school.

Fool, said my muse to me

as if it were talking to Sir Philip Sydney

look into your heart and write.

And you can tell by the colour of my lips

I’ve been drinking eclipses out of an inkwell ever since

convinced I’m a fallen sparrow in an ailing kingdom

that’s been sipping elixirs like cocktails

out of a holy grail with little black umbrellas in it

that keep blooming in the house

like a black mass of bad luck.

I tried emptiness once

like a home-brewed remedy for heart burn

that tasted like Peking duck on a pyre of gasoline.

But the void spit me out

like the Johnny Appleseed of sacred syllables

so whenever I try to meditate my way back into the void

through the backdoor

I don’t chant aum, but ouch

and the dark night of my soul

deepens into the anti-enlightenment

of the sinister dark matter at hand

like a Sicilian family at the beginning

of twentieth century New York

where they ghettoize the scapegoats

each according to their ethnicity

so you can recognize them

like the logos of brand-names

the yellow stars, the black hands,

the four leaf clovers, the West Side stories

of the Spanish moons in partial eclipse

or if there’s anyone else there like me

the skull and crossbones

I wear like my heart on my sleeve.

It’s three a.m., for example,

in a crummy Holiday Inn hotel room

overlooking Lake Ontario

where the dead fish

surface belly-up like U-boats along the shore

and a naked fan of my poetry

off in dreamland without me

looks like a mermaid washed up

in the surf of the bedsheets on her own rocks.

I’m sitting in the dark

before a wide-screen window

trying to make out the constellations

through the light pollution of Kingston

the way I used to reconstruct secret messages

like the Rosetta Stone

in grade four

from the few letters that were left

when the chalkboard wasn’t completely erased

by some windshield wiper of a teacher

trying to change the subject in a hurry

like some white-wash graffiti artist under a bridge

that didn’t want to get caught in the cover-up

that lied to the whole class

about the iron pyrite truths

that lay ahead of us

like a bright future of fools’ gold.

But even if the starlight’s been diminished

by a smear campaign

that’s going to take more than Windex to undo

and they’ve lost some of their criminal lustre

I still see in each of those rogue stars

the dark boat of a rum-runner

beached like me with a mermaid

in the labyrinth of the Thousand Islands

ten years after the lifting of prohibition left

everyone with a hangover for the rest of their lives

knocking their heads against a locked door

like the yachts in the docks below me.

There are some poets like Shakespeare

who recommend giving airy nothing

a local habitation and a name

and I’m not calling him a rat;

it’s good advice for all honest citizens of the universe

when they’re talking to the cops,

but it smacks a little too much of the snitch to me

and I’m sitting here with my mouth shut

staring blankly out

into the airy nothing of this night sky

trying to write a poetic alibi

for why I’ve got nothing to say

and even when the heat gets turned up so high

there’s sweat on the inside of the one-way windows,

I still refuse to squeal on yesterday.

PATRICK WHITE