Tuesday, January 8, 2013

THREE YEARS OUT OF FOUR


THREE YEARS OUT OF FOUR

Three years out of four, I’m a piano tuner
for the Julian calendar, gone like the extra day
of a leap year with nothing but time on my hands.
I’ve been seeking sanctuary among the stars
since I bought my first telescope as a boy,
and started working at leaving the earth,
but I haven’t found an embassy that will take me in.
So I languish in this self-imposed exile
holding long conversations with windows and lenses.
One day I’m Spinoza. And the next day, I’m Ovid.
When I’m not lying down like the threshold
of a humiliating synagogue, or grinding glass in a garret
in between bouts of philosophy, I’m polishing
the Tristes of my tears with bitter carborundum.

Jewelled perfection of cold Botticellian blue outside.
Ice placked snow drooping on the windowsills.
The greasy sidewalks lying in wait for hip transplants.
I don’t belong here as much as it seems anywhere else.
I’m holed up like the last of the Neanderthals in Gibraltar
with a bigger brain than I know what to do with,
looking for Venus above the decorative buttresses and rosettes
of the fieldstone rooftops in the sunset of my extinction.
Poor me, I mock myself, as a retort to self-pity.
Poor bears. Poor squirrels. Poor homeless cats.
Poor people on the street with happy faces for lifemasks
they wear like man hole covers over gutters of disappointment.

Busy chores I should be attending to like a good gene
labouring to insure and advance my survival,
but I’m close to despair and my heart lies heavy and idle
as a lunar hand-axe I flint knapped out of an eclipse
like a new moon chipped from obsidian. Shaky. Irritable. Unstable.
The winged quarter horses of my emotions
yoked to a death cart like breakers to a constellation
of dead sea stars. I’m trying to sow wildflower seeds
in the fissures of glacial earthquakes cracking like mirrors
but it’s the wrong time of year for anything to come up.

No faith. No dreams. No expectations. More of the same.
Dusty mobiles dripping with crystals against
a grimy windowpane with milky cataracts
letting less and less light in, diurnally, and the stars
smeared and smudged like the spider-mites of time
on the stalactite unicorns and sloppy, one-horned chandeliers
on the underside of my tears dying like unwatered plants.

But I’m trying. I’m attempting to shoulder
this heavy lift of a world like a rafter up over my head,
and if not a rafter in a sound house of the zodiac
with honourable foundation-stones quarried from cemeteries
that go back deep into the heritage past, then, at least
the keel of the moon passing over the Great Barrier Reef
I seem to have become like a fossilized spine of coral polyps
as brittle as the vertebrae of a lunar archipelago
of surviving dinosaurs huddled around their dying serpent fires
like the homeless around the mattresses and burning oildrums
under a highway exit ramp. Down, down, down, they
all go into the down like London bridge. And then
I remember the voice of an old Bodhidharma doll I met once
who was quadriplegic having lost his limbs meditating,
who said seven times down eight times up, such is life.

Such is life. But I’m punchy as a boxer who didn’t throw the fight.
Off road emotionally, I’m jacking up my drive wheel
to swing it out of this ditch and back on to the thoroughfare
I’ve salted like Carthage with kitty litter, ashes, and sand,
to keep on spinning my wheels, true to an illuminated way of life
on the greasy mirrors of an enlightened ice age. Hot damn.
Something to look forward to at last. Penquins in the Galapagos.
The smell of diesel narwhales and nuclear submarines in Frobisher Bay.

I’ve got to find higher ground than that to drain my grave
on this spiritual flood plain. I’ve got to screw a brighter lightbulb
into my housewell to keep it from freezing. I’ve got to grow
another layer of skin on the pearls of my nacreous mystics
beseeching shamanistic dolmens in the Arctic not to keep
their mouths shut about Silla, the indwelling spirit of life,
who says that you can trust the universe completely
in a voice so soft children aren’t afraid of it
though they’re often led astray out into the tundra.

Come dark. Bring me your stars like constellations
in the Burgess Shale of the night. Lift my seas up
into precipitous mountains riddled with subliminal secrets of starmud
that could pack these scars and cracks in my prophetic skull
with motherlodes of gold the way they do in Japan
to show respect for their broken tea cups as if somehow
to drink from the lips of the mended and restored made the tea
taste sweeter than Zen. I’m hanging this white flag of snow
out of my window, asking for a cease-fire and a truce,
and maybe if it isn’t over-reaching, a peace treaty
between who I am and who I am thinks I should have been.

I asked my cat to be my guru when I got to the point
I wanted to fling things around in a road rage of asteroids.
I wanted to go out in blaze of light like a comet from the Kuiper belt,
or a tantric boy with a matchbook in a fireworks factory
but my cat just looked at me with the first and last crescents
like parentheses around the black moon in her eyes
and said it’s up to you to fill in the blanks
of your own waxing and waning. And, of course, she’s right.
Who knows more about the ebb and neap of the tidal flows
and undertows of life, love, and light than a fully illuminated cat does?

PATRICK WHITE

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