LONG-LEGGED REFLECTIONS OF FORESHORTENED STREETLIGHTS

LONG-LEGGED REFLECTIONS OF FORESHORTENED STREETLIGHTS

Long-legged reflections of foreshortened streetlights

plunging their daggers like great blue herons

waiting with the craft shop Inuit, harpoons in hand,

above the man cover blow holes

for the occasional asphalt fish to swim by

or a crosswalk orca coming up for air

unmindful of the bleeding revelations

hemorrhaging like the tail lights and chokecherries

of baby seals being clubbed to death

all over the ice floe like a work by Jackson Pollock.

The day’s divinity. First thing you see.

But what if you wake up at night fall

as I just have, and open your eyes

like bi-valved, goose-necked barnacles

to the incoming tide of consciousness

and you’re not especially looking for miracles

but peering down through a grimy apartment window

you see this small conservative Ontario town,

with its clocktower too slow to keep up with time

and the spindly green insect of its spare watershed

elevated like the space program of a tall sputnik on stilts,

has been slumming in the Garden of Eden on mushrooms?

What kind of a sign should I mistake that for?

Is it me? Or a random paradigm of intelligent design?

Or maybe Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and the moon

are not aligned with the traffic lights

and old fashioned lampposts like nightwatchmen

glowing in the snow like the candled lanterns

they hold up on nineteen fifties Christmas cards

to show you everything’s just fine among

the beautifully snow blind and intellectually dutiful

trying to teach amputee fire hydrants

how to climb siege ladders up to my room

as if there were anyone awake enough yet to put out

like an unseasonal moonrise that went out on a limb for me.

First thing I see when I open my eyes at night

and I’m the unexpurgated prophet in the belly

of a beached futon, is the atavistic polymorphous perverse

trying to manipulate caesuras like green stick fractures

along the fault line of a zodiac that breaks

like an earthquake shaking its fieldstones of bad verse

into the emotional quicksand of stars in the eyeless dark.

If I ask for slim lifeboats, don’t send me

to the book launch of an ark after a first few

drops have fallen like dew on thin-skinned crocodiles.

Apres moi, le deluge. And the moon rising

to the surface like a white beluga through the clouds

after four hours of swimming in the brain corals

of a deep sleep dreaming of three stage harpoons

on a take off gantry for weather balloons

huffing laughing gas like dragons in dentist’s chairs

trying to put a brave face on all the mirrors in the house

that show me breaking down into tears at the sight

of the spoon running away with the moon

being cooked like moonrocks in a meteor shower

by a lab rat in a white coat that makes it look

like the plain white envelope of a loveletter

that lifts the moon’s spirits like the bubble

rising to the top of the Seattle Space Needle.

Or as Rumi said somewhere in an hallucinogenic trance

of self-annihilation, the bird of my blood

is rising into the sky of my brain. In my case,

the ecstasy of a hawk whose eyes have never

been trained to wear even so much as the night for a hood.

PATRICK WHITE