NO HONEY IN THE HIVE OF THE LANTERN

NO HONEY IN THE HIVE OF THE LANTERN

No honey in the hive of the lantern,

no flower, no flame, no light, no people

in the warmth of the windows with a sales-pitch,

I sit at my desk in front of this computer-screen,

the snow outside a million gentle pixels of white,

and I wonder if the dead buried in this page

are sensitive enough to feel it on their graves.

And I’m weary of lifemasks trying to achieve

the desired effect while the living eat neglect

and mediocrities are trying to speak

like best-selling books where the stars are just words

and the bees have been culled for humming sacred syllables.

Numb with stasis more than a month now,

no scalpel like the waning crescent of the moon at my wrist,

muses of static electricity jumping from my fingertips

to startle a few dozy lyrics into life, my lips

cracked and cloven by the archaeological air,

I’ve been painting waterlilies and blue dragonflies

to keep something green and liquid alive

in the desperate urns of my soul on the windowsill.

I’m a ladder in a tar pit walking up the down escalator

rung by rung, threshold by threshold, foothold by foothold

feather by feather, salmon by salmon and if there’s a pool

at the top I’m meant to pay regenerative tribute to

in some eternally recurring dream of time

with my black and blue battered life,

and this bent wavelength of my crooked sword, so be it.

I’ll haul myself up like an inevitable lifeboat

to the rescue of my imminent shipwreck

though every nanosecond of the journey’s been

a crisis at the crossroads and I’ve learned to proceed

as I did as a kid with my wings outspread as if I could fly

from one thermal of a dust devil to the next in a back alley

where I used to kick stones down the road

like prophetic skulls I took for granted ahead of me.

If you were born into poverty as I was

and you couldn’t afford inspiration or you sensed

it was an elitist dream that hadn’t been blooded by life

and you stood aloof from it, half wary, half longing,

like a fragrant trap, you could always rely on your ennui

to get things done just to keep from being masticated

by your shelf life as a child. As I do now

experiencing myself as a highly trained doorway

to nowhere in particular as I walk from my easel

to my desk, my desk to my easel, trying to liberate

my disobedience like a caged truant in an aviary

of peacocks and pheasants that strut the fanfare of their tails

like comets stood up like bridal bouquets

at the pale altars of their unmarriageable daybreaks.

Nothing morbid, petty, self-pitying, or vindictive

in my solitude, no secret martyrs trying to beatify

the death of art, no ecclesiastic heretics breathing

hellfire and brimstone like scripture from their matchbooks,

I listen to the rasp of the same man I heard last winter

shovelling snow off the sidewalks in front of the bank

and the first drugstore ever established in heritage Canada

as if he were scraping off a canvas down

to the grisaille underpainting to start again and again

and again, as the storms pass over like a living

and I bond with him, how could I not, no one awake

but he and I, as a self-disciplined Sisyphean familiar,

labouring as anonymously as I am to do something useful

as hauling an avalanche uphill into a snowbank

where the heads of the parking meters are protruding through

like iron daffodils and frozen rat snakes too comatose yet

to dream of the vernal equinox liberating the sidewalks.

Almost six. The quick fix of the dawn soon calling it quits

for the nightshift that lives underground, and I’m still

caught in the coils of my genomic stairwells like the coils

of oracular pythons high on the volcanic fumes

of poetic caldera preparing to explode

like the igneous flowering of a magmatic watershed

gone supernova like an old luminary withdrawing into itself

like an emotional neap tide before a tsunami of starlight

beaches me like the ark of the Burgess Shale

high in navigable mountains of nautical rocks

after forty days and nights on a frozen sea of insight.

PATRICK WHITE