WHAT I HAVE NOT BEEN TO THE FEW I LOVED

WHAT I HAVE NOT BEEN TO THE FEW I LOVED

What I have not been to the few I loved,

the cost of what I am. Whoever that is.

And the poor boy happy ending

that was supposed to conclude in money

to redeem the aristocratic poverty

of a doomed childhood, scrapped

from the start as slavishly predictable.

I shone for a while, angry and bright

and university was an easy ordeal of guilt

while my mother washed floors in the Uplands,

and I went through culture shock

in my own country to learn that

not everybody lived the way we did

never further than twenty concrete blocks

away from the despair and poverty of home.

Three meals a day and shopping tours

to Europe, with a jaunt to Auschwitz

along the way. My mother would dress up

for three hours to go to the corner-store.

And it was everything I could do

to keep from laughing out loud

at the pygmies of pain in English Honours

who cried their eyes out in the library

because their mothers were social butterflies

and it was the sixties on the West Coast

when no one was suppose to live in vain.

And I remember the little wet doctor’s sons

who used to remind me of who

they thought I was, asking me, at the end

of an advanced Shakespeare seminar,

at the end of a creative writing class,

after a three hour oral exam on Marlowe,

to sell them heroin I didn’t use or deal

to make them feel, like the postcards of Auschwitz

that showed the skulls in the furnaces

and read Arbeit macht frei,

they were slumming with reality, lest

I forget despite how well I did in class,

where I came from. And the difference

was obvious and lasting. So many things

I had to master just to wear a plausible lifemask

into the golden future of the middle class.

How to sit down at a table and eat

with cutlery as if I were doing surgery.

How to relate to the trivializing of the poor,

listening squeamishly to the screening myths

of how the rich suffer at their hands.

How my mother with hands and knees,

cracked like lobsters boiled in bleach

was leeching them dry on welfare.

I broke up with their daughters.

I punished their sons atavistically

and losing my taste for trying to prove

you could find diamonds in the coalbin

of everyone’s ancestry, and I could stand

eye to eye with the stars as well as anyone,

I ran with a wolfpack of ex-cons

who accepted me as a well-educated

one of their own. And through it all

I returned to poetry after every brawl

and threw everybody off my back

to climb a private mountain of my own

while my mother said do

what makes you happy

and went on scrubbing floors.

PATRICK WHITE