Friday, June 22, 2012

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

BROODING SUNSET BEFORE THE STORM


BROODING SUNSET BEFORE THE STORM

Brooding sunset before the storm. Over ripe apricot
left out in the sun too long. Heat brain
boiling its thoughts in their own womb.
The clouds lumber like thundering Diplodoci
Slowly and in herds. Continental rifts in Pangaea.
Black outs and the lightning roots
of unknown blossoms sticking out their tongues
like petals to taste the first drops of rain.
The air menacing, thick, humid as lipstick
foreshadowing climactic things to come.

Sky bound i.e.d.s, and the pigeons scattering
for cover under the eves from overhead drones
that have been circling all afternoon
with the turkey vultures looking for road kill.
The windows set up like easels for the show.
Action paintings of still life with blitzkrieg.
The crackling of glass that layered black over white.
Oleaceous vapours of asphalt on roofs and roads.
I can smell the late Jurassic in rut from here
as black pearls roll off my skin like new moons
sweating tar. And now it’s as dark as a crucifixion
on daylight savings time, as the opalescent grays
homogenize into Bosch armies on the Western Front
just before a rolling barrage in No Man’s Land.
The hemorrhaging, the deluge, the venting, the rage,
a welcome relief to holding it all in though
everybody’s not going to like what they hear
and the fire hydrants are jealous of the rain
and the end of the world is more American than Mayan
bring it on like the hillbilly hippies drunk at the Imperial.

Anticipation. Latent exhilaration. Acoustic guitars
meditating in the corner, chanting aum to resonate
with the positive ions of a punk rock band on the rampage.
The cows plop down in the fields, and the seagulls
for the duration of the saturation bombing run
are grounded like kites on a reconnaissance mission.
Hilarity of chaos outflanking the usual order of things.
Mosquitoes and blackflies biding their time
under the monstrous leaves of the soft basswood trees.
Wrens and swallows in their medicine bags and begging bowls,
bees in their hives, prophets in the belly of the whale,
here comes a delegation of lightning rods to reason
with the open-handed extravagance of the revelation
that we’re as vulnerable as we ever were
in a time of stagnation to cooking the books
when the gods come to get even with us ethically
and the imagination asserts its ancient privileges
over the prophylactic rituals of our own worst case scenarios.
Some to dance naked in the rain. Some to stand
under lone trees in open fields trying not to get bit
by a snake pit of oracular lucidities with the aloofness of a lottery.

PATRICK WHITE

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