I WAS A BOY IN CAMPBELL RIVER

I WAS A BOY IN CAMPBELL RIVER

I was a boy in Campbell River, six years old,

and my mother was crying because

she had been abandoned by my father

and had no food for her four children. I told

the strangers my mother was crying,

she had no food for her children,

my father was gone, and in the morning,

boxes of food, while we were sleeping,

stacked high on the wrap-around verandah,

not a gift of the fairies, though it could have been so,

but of the people, the good townspeople

who had come in the night, giving,

to spare my mother’s pride. I hoped

I was my mother’s hero

when she stopped crying. And secretly,

deep within me

as if I’d found a power jewel

I didn’t know I had:

the mouth, the sound, the word, and the heart

that listened: how utterly amazing

that I could do this, that I could speak

and things just happened, good things

for good people who needed help,

for good people who could help:

my mother stopped crying. And again, older,

with a passion for stars

because no one could soil them,

telescopes, because they’re women,

Egyptian mysteries, E.J. Pratt,

model aircraft, and Keats.

I’d write at sunset up on Heartbreak Hill,

where the old prison

that hung seven men

and buried them in the yard once stood,

the bones smothered in yellow broom.

I want you to understand this.

I’d write at sunset up on Heartbreak Hill

where “a thing of beauty

was a joy forever,”

and I was alone, as the night approached

and the hurtful world withdrew,

with myself, a telescope, and the stars

that nobody could touch,

that danced in the lens

like fireflies in a canning jar,

other worlds that knew better than this one.

I was published at ten, and then

awards, highschool, the emotional molasses

of big, sticky feelings that were real tears

but took hours to fall from the eyes

of the ages that groaned like my mother;

the usual tarpit depressions, lavish praise

from the unimpressible English teachers,

my hard, surrogate fathers,

and a lot of golden futures and abalone dawns,

but my best themes

were always wounded animals,

the underdogs, the ones with no voice but mine

which I honed on the stone of the moon

for war, justice, love, wonder.

These were my adolescent centuries

and I used them well, erecting

profound obelisks of thought

scrawled with immortal feeling,

the tragic graffiti of spring,

without forgetting I had a body

and two lives, one on the street,

and the other in my room

where blood and knives reverted

to roses and thorns, a chrysalis

for dragonflies. And the word had eyes

long before it grew a heart

that mattered. Until university, and a woman

who was an apostate madonna

with grails, a Magdelenic muse

who brained me with soft stones

that hurt like lilies, an Irish girl

I married for her white fire

and green eyes. Grails aren’t cauldrons

and cataracts in the eye,

flowers in the sky,

but the word learned

the triune identity of existence,

longing, celebration, lament.

And I lived everything in the name of poetry,

fucking, funambulism and fury.

The word made itself a god, a shrine,

and raised an idol to itself

and forced itself to its knees.

Only my daughter

was a grace beyond the creed. And these

were the decades of another darkness

deeper than night.

And then I met the black angel Aztec

who killed me, in a distant city

far from the sea. I buried

her knife in my wound, and the fire was hot,

blue, acetylene, and I was humbled by the word,

by the voodoo of her beauty

and without even realizing

I was dead,

truly learned to sing, doves

in the ashes everywhere, oceans

in the rose, stars

that struck like spears

and a long night that was not a reward.

And then the books and the prizes

they laid on my grave

to honour someone I didn’t believe in,

as if the word had disappeared like a bird

into the bright vacancy,

the dark abundance of the sky

with the thread of my blood in its beak

and I could never heal,

and haven’t. And these were the years

black lightning

used me like a filament.

But I moved to the country

with a noble witch from Westmount,

a private thorn with heart

and kept watch in a sacred grove,

King of the Wood

with a rubber sword

for a lightning rod. Paradise awhile

and then I fell again

without a parachute or poppy

to ease the descent. And the women came

with burning ladders

in negligees of gasoline

and tried to turn the phoenix green

but I knew too much about ashes

to dream for long.

For one, the moon was a scythe

and I was starwheat, for another,

a double-bladed ax

that had to fall

on the sons of the sins of the fathers

and didn’t care

if I were an execution or a sacrifice,

and still another, a cougar of desire,

spread her crescents into claws

and mauled my heart like a robin,

but the last, and the youngest,

the final dismemberment

and the worst, drank blood from my skull

when the moon went into eclipse.

And I bless them all forever

from the bottom of a well

where the stars walk on water

and the night is a fractured bell.

And these were the months

that drowned like middle-age,

and the word was robbed of its feathers

and learned to fly like a snake.

Now weeks, days, hours,

bring me their honey and lilacs,

and the old wars I fought for others,

the artillery of my books,

the fuses, the explosives

are matches in the sun,

the abandoned armories of hell,

my blood flagged at half-mast

as the skeletons of strange constellations

that litter the field like legends

unmarrowed by the changes,

mint new medals

for a black farce

that haunts me like the shadow

of the happy crow

that plucks the stars from my eyes;

and now the word is not a word,

and poetry is not a poem,

and the moon is not a widow

who waits by the sea

bruising her heart with gray roses,

but a moment of life, longer than death,

that sings to itself in the starless dark

in a language all of its own.

PATRICK WHITE