I SHOULD BE LIGHT YEARS AWAY FROM HERE BY NOW

I SHOULD BE LIGHT YEARS AWAY FROM HERE BY NOW

I should be light years away from here by now.

Too full of shadows. Encyclopedic sorrows

that keep updating themselves. Artistic ordeals

that return me to the world stranger than I was.

More alone. With my indeterminate talent

for living through things like arrows pushed

all the way through to the other side. I should be

out of this raving asylum any day now.

I should be released like a beast from a zoo

by a lightning storm that gnawed its way through the bars.

My last attachment in this zendo of mirageless monks

a rope in the basement, so as not to discourage the kids.

When is enough, enough? Go ask Plato,

or better yet, Plath, Essenin, Mayakovsky, Lao-tzu,

or that ingenuous adolescent down the street

who shot himself in his parents’ laundry room

when his girlfriend said he wasn’t fun enough?

Proved her right. Gouged his parents’ hearts out.

Me? I thought I could shine for the eyeless.

I thought I could make something out of the starmud

of my middle-aged childhood, that honoured my mother.

One time I knew all the names of the stars

in four languages and all their symbolic meanings.

I taught myself algebra on my grade six summer vacation.

One time I could be grinding pyrex parabolic mirrors

with carborundum and a razor blade and a lightbulb

and a catalogue of diffraction patterns to smooth out

the angstroms for ten inch reflecting telescopes

on equatorial mounts, and the next, lighting

a gang leader from Hong Kong up with a jar of gasoline

to get him and his buddies to stop burning cats

or bashing their eyes out with baseball bats

in my Pacific Rim neighbourhood. A Kafkaesque disadvantage

in a cat fight. But I always had this little black pearl

of hope in my heart to go back to like a new moon

that said the spring is bitter, but things are going to get

better sooner than you think. Green apples

still give me gripe. And they’re fallacious when they’re ripe.

Translated Euripides, the Gallic Wars, the Greek Anthology,

seeded thousands of paintings on the wind

like surrealistic milk weed pods from the l0lst Airborne,

and written more poems than even I can remember

that sit stacked in boxes by the thousands in the studio closet

like the segments of a column I haven’t assembled yet

to commemorate my campaign against mediocrity

that no one’s ever heard of yet. Pyrrhic victory

that would have cost as much to lose

as it took to win these spray-painted laurels of tin.

Was a time I worried about myself as an individual

in relation to the tradition of a university literary curriculum

but now there are no individuals and to judge

from what doesn’t get read of the great dead

it’s at least honourable to be acquainted with,

put a poppy and a stalk of wheat on their graves,

no tradition either. Just these club meds of verbiage

when the butterflies land on the lips of their drinks

like cocktail umbrellas. Rimbaud’s eternal cry

of protest against against the calcined fossils

of poetry booking a reading in the Burgess Shale

realities ahead of time. Merd! Merd! Merd!

Like a serial killer stabbing someone to death.

Nothing vatic about the random action of molecules.

No hidden harmonies of earth buried in the astro-turf.

No roots on the plastic flowers, no urgent necessities,

no emergency transcendence, no panicked search

for exits and entrances when the house is on fire,

No mottled fools hoping to bump into a holy grail,

No myths like the Mafia to back every word up

with an offer you can’t refuse. Nothing portentous

as a comet in the flaring of a matchbook

of phosphorus red orchids with daring red eyes.

Dearth. Vacuity. The cynical gratuity

of the gnostic gospels of comic books

no one’s going to read on their way to the grave.

The dependent tolerance of institutional paternalism

bringing the mountain down on everyone’s heads

in an avalanche of awards and grants

that block the road between Terrace and Prince Rupert

as dawn breaks up like ice on the Skeena,

to make sure its forms are quisling enough

to pass a jury if not the way to the sea

of a more dangerous aspiration than a crossword puzzle.

Here lie all those whose names were written in jello.

Whose shrines were Campbell soup can tins.

Whose heart bridged the existential gaps

between hollow and shallow like a reality show

that never went broke underestimating human intelligence

as P.T. Barnum was fond of reminding his circus clowns.

Poetry so fireproof now you could use it

for the insulation of a crack house without worrying

anything is going to break into flames. Or Rimbaud.

Or a Chinese gang leader torching cats.

They’ve pulled the fangs of the moon.

No incisors in their mouths. No thorns on the roses.

And work you could recognize anywhere by its logo,

its celebrity brand name, outdated as soon as sought,

cotton candy befuddled in Lindsay Lohan’s hair.

No birds in their cosmic eggs. No Big Bangs

to get anything started among the membranes

of their birth sacs. Just this endless steady state theory

of still borns deriding anything apocalyptically

coming out of a self-induced coma without a headache.

Want to hang the medal of the moon around

the throat of a night bird, or a choir of wolves,

to see how it estranges their singing from their longing,

their immaculate solitude from a mob of voyeurs

with the hasty tastes of a locust plague of troubadours

that long for nothing so much as a literary career

in a colony of towering termites, with or without a queen.

The democratic revenge upon sidereal exceptionalism.

The whole barnyard full of muddy eagles at ground level.

Or being lead around by donkeys, in chains.

And the muse? The muse never visits you

if you don’t sacrifice your first best goat,

put nothing less than everything on the line all the time,

and never having had a taste of that kind

of apostate creative freedom sweeter than sin,

you’re just another fly buzzing at the windowpane

as if it were a vision of life based on punctuation.

PATRICK WHITE