Tuesday, January 3, 2012

AT SEVENTEEN


AT SEVENTEEN

At seventeen, having crawled out from under the street
and made my way through the culture shock
of my first year of an affluent university
with easy access to the sea,
I made my way north to a pit stop coffee-shop
on a lonely highway at a place
called Windy Point as I recall
northwest of Prince George.
I remember the tractor trailers full of strawberries
festering like hot sacrificial hearts
bruised by the quick summer,
and the electrically charged aura of bees and wasps
that hovered over them and hummed
like a powerline tuning up in the rain.
I was a young teacher assigned by Frontier College
to live and labour and teach
five hours a night after dinner on a work train,
lining, tamping, laying track on an extra gang
of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway,
forty miles as the crow flies into the bush.
I remember the impoverished trees
that grew smaller and smaller
in the immensity of their solitude and mine
as I was driven deeper into the bush
by two railwaymen who said about as much
to the long-haired hippie in the back of their jeep
as I’d said all year to myself in my sleep,
as the silence grew more aggressive by the mile
bumped along by the side of the track.
You him. Yup. Get in. And that was it.
That was as much of a welcome as I was going to get.
Or as far as they were concerned
I had a right to expect because
the illusive idealism of the sixties
was still an embryo in the matrix of a dreamcatcher
trying to jimmy the locks on the doors of perception
forgetting it’s just as easy as light
as it is for a thief or the moon
to get in through the windows.
The threat of their worst nightmare
coming unglued like the perfectly bound
paperback edition
of their unlovable orthodoxy
and unlivable reactionary redneck rectitude.
Flower power spread like fire
through the radicalized roots
of the underdogs, draft dodgers and drop-outs
fight for the right to cast its vote
like Japanese cherry blossoms on the wind
to accommodate a better more spontaneous world
to the portable Zen of their creative imaginations.
The hawks and the doves,
the fireflies locked in ice
and the snowflakes on a furnace
fighting over whose cosmic eggs
in a war of F-4s against
magic carpets with a flight plan
best measured up to the wingspan
of the winds of change
while down below their nests
in the highest crowns of the trees
dark wavelengths
hatched out of their black holes
like baby snakes
that had just passed through
the third eye of the needle
aspiring to win their wings
and become dragons of the air
by swallowing the eggs of either species
whole cosmologies at a time
and regurgitating the remains
like the collapsed parachutes
and used condoms of the moon
as if they could shed their skins
from the inside out.
Either extreme a fang in the skull
of a harvest moon in a year of famine.
And there were far fewer people
trying to firewalk their way to the stars
back in those days than there were
spiritual tourists trying to walk on water.
So I took the middle extreme of the dragon’s path
and grew a third wing down the spine of my back
like the keel of a schooner,
the dorsal fin of a shark
with the heart of a dolphin
or the tail rudder of a plane
just to keep things immensely balanced
like a phoenix between Icarus and the sun.
I oscillated like a wavelength of starmud
between the Himalayan apexes
of mystic contemplation,
the death valleys of meditation,
and the troughs where it got down and dirty
as the mysticism of action
that had to follow the blossom of insight
like water all the way up from the root
and then take it a step further, into the fruit.
And that’s why I volunteered
the sceptical lack of innocence
of my ambiguous idealism
to be brutalized by the wilderness
into the scar tissue of experience
as if I had just skinned a unicorn
and now I had to tan the leather.
And that’s why I was on my way
to bring education to the working man
in the wilds of northern B.C.
At seventeen, I was
the Johnny Appleseed of knowledge
armed to the teeth
with the revolutionary rose
of a virtuous cause
righteous as the thorn of the moon
in the side of the dawn.
I was the ladder out of the same snakepit
of poverty and ignorance I had crawled out of
like the skeleton of a hummingbird
out of a continental shipwreck
that had nowhere to dock in Atlantis but down.
One foot each astride two ties of a railway trestle,
nothing but a fifty pound iron lining bar
wedged under the track
as I pulled with all my might
backwards into oblivion
to align with one parallel line with another.
And through the gap between the ties
a hundred and twenty feet below me
a thin silver stream, tinfoil in sunlight,
wandering through the grey skulls
of a washed-out cemetery of insight.
The rocks I would be smashed upon
like an egg head out of the nest
if I were to suddenly fall like Icarus
through the gaps in the supine ladder
I was standing on,
or in the cruel grey eyes of the men
who were sizing me up
showed any kind of cowardice
to remind them how dangerous this was,
or if I used my education
like a parachute I could pull out of my ass
every time I was called upon like a bridge
to bestride the abyss like a man
and keep my shit together
as if courage weren’t a virtue,
but a gland I was missing from birth.
Gnothi seauton Socrates said in his Attic dialect,
as he was about to drink the hemlock.
Know yourself and I did well enough
to know as I often had in similar situations
when bravery might let you down
madness was enough to pull you through,
and for reasons they well understood
made me as crazy as they were,
I slowly won their respect
and one by one they came
to my little frontier school
where I bunked alone
coupled to my long, lonely train of thought
like a mutant gene
to a helical protein molecule
we went to work everyday with lining bars
to straighten out after
underground rivers of clay
had moved under them in the night
like flesh and blood drawn to a new idea.
I taught the Portuguese, who,
after working ten hours a day
would wash up, eat, play soccer till dark,
and then come to me
to learn how to swear back at bigots
like the low men on the totem pole
of British Columbians, Albertans,
New Brunswickers, Newfies and natives
in that hierarchical order of serfdom.
Exiles, outlaws, refugees, lunatics, outcasts,
who’d fill their pillows with modest samples
of the pubic hair of every woman
they’d ever slept with for years
or by four in the afternoon, every afternoon
when the timekeeper called a break
to let it happen, would shake their fist at the sun
and throw shovels around as hard as they could
that would kill you outright
if you ever got in the way of one
like a proofreader mistaking verbs for nouns
in an unknown mother tongue
that only the sun
and thousands of hectares of muskeg understood.
These were the mad ones, the ones
who worked like troglodytes all day,
arms sinewed like railroad tracks,
hearts beating like anvils in the hot sun
and said nothing,
as if nothing need be said
after forty years in the bush.
But come night in the separate cars
they each were assigned
to sleep isolated in the dark,
had raging conversations with themselves
like a treeful of roosting crows
so you couldn’t tell if you were listening
as I did every night in curious apprehension
the anguished echo of one voice
from another being thrown
across the room in rebuttal
by a polyglot ventriloquist
like Luther’s startled inkwell at Lucifer.
And then at four again, every afternoon,
shovels flung anywhere
like the hands of a clock
flying off like the petals of a propeller
as if they hated God for something
and for ten to fifteen minutes
at four in the afternoon every day
for as long as anyone could remember
felt compelled to start a riot
against the sun, the sky gods,
the wind, the wilderness, who knew,
but even they seemed to know
like crows at the highest pitch of their protest,
they couldn’t do anything about.
Nothing in the Norton Anthology of English Literature
nor a few weeks in a training session
at the University of Calgary
to see who would be posted where
had prepared me for this
but I winged it like a stone or an Arctic Cat
out over the open water of a lake
and soon I had several classes
of natives, Portuguese, drunken reprobates,
and a mix of curiosity seekers
more interested in being entertained
than educated on a work train
where nothing much ever happens
except extreme violence on a Friday night
and tragic accidents in the workplace
that could have been avoided.
And what surprised
and humbled me the most
two philosophers, one
from New Brunswick
and the other, Alberta,
who’d been out here so long
in the brutal isolation of the bush,
keeping their lives to themselves,
they made Henry David Thoreau look like a fake.
And for five months it went on like this
until UBC sent me the first film
to be screened on a work train this far north
and it turned out to be opening night
for the much anticipated premiere
of two teenagers learning about syphilis,
that immediately estranged a packed house
who thought I was talking down to them
as if they didn’t already know
everything there was to know about the disease.
Though I tried to plead with them
this wasn’t my choice of movies
but some idiot’s down south,
I knew my Socratic moment had come
to drink the hemlock of my idealism
and after I was knocked out in a bar fight
stepping out of a washroom in Prince George
I woke up back on the train
with a raging migraine that felt like
forty thousand hectares of muskeg
and a time keeper urgently insisting
I go back into Prince George without hesitation,
buy a thirty-eight from a friend of his,
and shoot the motherfucker who did this to me
to teach him some respect for the English language.
And that was it, time to go,
time to blow Windy Point,
time to thumb my way back to Vancouver
as if I were turning the pages of book
where art had failed to imitate life
convincingly enough to put a full stop
like a bullet hole through the temple
of some drunk logger’s head
which is what I had to do in their eyes.
Pick up a gun to prove I was man enough
to go on teaching them
about John Donne’s attitude toward death
and know from first hand experience
that left no doubt in their minds
I knew what I was talking about.
And of course I wasn’t and didn’t.
And for hundreds of miles
of black asphalt after that
I felt like a tractor trailer
hauling thousands of wounded strawberries
bruised by their own innocence
in a freak encounter with experience
to a hard empty free bench for the night
in the Camby Street bus station
that helped immeasurably in the morning
put all this behind me for awhile
like the wake of a ferry in the Georgia Straight
threading its way through the islands
wondering what just went down in despair
like another undermanned lifeboat over the side
of the flat moon society
rowing for all their worth
in a dead sea of shadows
that Sisyphus would have understood
balanced on a turtle’s carapace
like the skull of the earth
when it rises over the horizon
like a magic mushroom
or the podium at the head of a classroom
everyone pushes out of the way
to prove they can relate without barriers
to anyone eye to eye
without knowing whether
they really can or not
and whether the bond
is mutually reciprocal
until it’s way too late
way too late not to, brother.

PATRICK WHITE

TRYING TO LAUGH AT MYSELF


TRYING TO LAUGH AT MYSELF

Trying to laugh at myself to get out of a black depression. Mad. Angry. Sad. The way January is sad but cold. Lonely in a way that doesn’t call for company. Intense, but then so are the stars. Everything missing, but no sense of anything lacking. A desert, but nothing in arrears. Not a cynic. Nor wholly yet, the dupe of my own ideals. Truly impoverished the man who doesn’t have anything in his life to make a fool of himself over. He upstaged the waters of life conceptually and now he swims through glass. I pity him who doubts the echo of his own voice and can’t let the universe put its hand from behind over his eyes like the wings of a child from time to time and ask him to guess. Who’s this? It’s true that clarity can sometimes feel like your eyes had just been slashed by an edge of broken glass, but that doesn’t mean you take a scalpel to the eyelids of a rose to get it to see what you do. Why bother if everything’s as futile as you say it is? The truth can wound. There’s no doubt about that. But it wounds like the beauty of a black rose with crescent moons for thorns. It doesn’t stick it to you like a dagger through the heart. Insight. Compassion. Blossom and fruit. Moonlight that heals what the daylight burns. A feel for the living that goes beyond thought. Like this voice that’s come to me out of thin air as I’m sitting here without any oars, trying to make an empty lifeboat out of the ribcage of a great white shark with eclipsed camera lenses for eyes. And I don’t know who they are, or if we’ve met somewhere in the prelude of a past life that led to this one, or even if talking to myself this way were a sure sign that matter doesn’t just bend space but mind and time as well. But it’s enough they know who they are and I’ve let them have their say, as I’ve had mine. As you who are listening in on this are having yours.

How cosmically still everything is. As if something were about to shatter. As if the mute, inanimate objects in the room had finally found their voice and were about to speak in tongues. The orange lamp, the violet vase that spills over like a watershed into an Arum ivy, the blue glass skull on the windowsill smearing the red logo of the bank across the street like blood all over its face, not nouns, but the verbs of a universal language we each translate in our own way into a dream grammar of Rosetta Stones. Prophetic skulls talking in our sleep. It’s good to let a gust of stars get in your eyes like a mirage once and awhile. It’s generous to let the dead slip through the doors of perception you’ve left ajar for their shadows to come in out of the cold and warm their bones around your fire, and tell you stories of who they were in life. They seldom stay long. And then they’re gone. Like smoke from a distant farmhouse in the winter dawn. Been down so long it looks like up to me, Richard Farina said on the way to die at his own book launching, thrown from the back of a motorcycle, but what’s that but the mood swing of an hourglass that keeps approaching its past like the future of something that hasn’t happened yet? And if you know what I mean, then it’s quite clear that you’re here in this asylum with me hoping no one’s discovered you yet. But there you are. I can see you. All tied up in knots like a wavelength in the corner. An embryo that’s trying to commit suicide by hanging yourself from the noose of your umbilical cord. Who are you? Did you get here the same way I did? Or by some other road? And why do that? You know something to be afraid of that I don’t? The things I fear most are not in a world of forms and it’s the crippled spirits that I find most dangerous. Are you a lamia, a lapwing, or the orphan moon of an unknown world that’s been entrusted to me like a secret that keeps to itself? Poor thing. Get up. Brush the ashes from your hair. The sleep out of the urns of your eyes. That shattered mirror out of your mind that kept on lying to you about how beautiful you weren’t even when you were and didn’t know it. Mirrors are like snakes, you can’t train them to bite other people or kiss your ass. All you can do is defang them like crescents of the moon, thorn by thorn, shard by shard like a snakepit of highly toxic chandeliers that have fallen on hard times. You just take some pliers and pull them out of your heart one by one like porcupine quills from the soft wet nose of a dog that will never learn. You stand there like the child of Joan of Arc martyred in the shadows of your mother’s sacrifice as if you belonged to a guild of secret saints, and you knock that chip of a demon off your shoulder who keeps whispering in your left ear if your fire is so much holier than mine, why haven’t you, as I have, immolated yourself in it yet? Just as there’s only one part in a hundred and twenty-six that’s different between you and a tree, chlorophyll or haemoglobin, whether you’re hanging from a crucifix or burning at the stake, there’s only one jewel’s difference between a dreamcatcher and a spiderweb. And that’s you, sapphire, the difference between two antidotes. But you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. Denying one thing here is as good as affirming it everywhere. And there are no laws here except the spontaneous physics of metaphor that’s driven us both like storm birds into the third eye of our own weather seeking asylum from the madness raging all around us like Jupiter, or, if I read you right, your violent father. I don’t know where this is. It doesn’t have a local habitation or a name, though I’ve been trying to give it one but nothing sticks. But here in this place for reasons I don’t fully understand, if you don’t want to sever your lifelines from those kites that you’ve been trying to keep up in the air like constellations, you learn to play so intensely with your creative imagination, whatever medium your working in, you’re absorbed like a child into the immensity of your own absence from your previous state of starless affairs. You’re shining, but you don’t need to know it. You’re dancing barefoot with the wind on air listening to the picture-music of the willows waltzing to the sound of the river that’s as light on its feet as it is on the mind. And there are visiting hours for people to come see you like bees and hummingbirds and dragonflies, or voices out of nowhere like the call of Canada geese high overhead at night in the autumn who speak for the dead in passing a last few intimate words they want the living to hear. Someone blows into your ear like the opening of an empty bottle that sounds like a wolf howling at the moon way off in the distance, so you listen to the message, and you write it down, and throw it like a whale with a prophet in its belly back into the sea like a fish you didn’t mean to catch that just jumped into your moon boat one night without putting up any kind of a fight. Here no one tries to turn the fireflies into the fixed stars of an orthodox starmap. You learn to delight in your madness like a native ritual you’ve been invited to participate in like tourist who was passing through and decided to stay like a flightplan that was happy to be grounded for light years in the homelessness of a space with feathers in its hair. Either that, if you take yourself too seriously, you die of terminal symbolitis in intensive care on the night ward of a hospital ship in dry dock on the moon and you miss your next port of call completely.

PATRICK WHITE