THE DAY WITH NO AMBITIONS. GREY. GREY.

THE DAY WITH NO AMBITIONS. GREY. GREY.

The day with no ambitions. Grey. Grey.

Stained-glass stars chained at the window,

Medusan mobiles hang like jellyfish,

motionless solar systems frozen in time,

mystic blue of burned out candle holders,

their flicker of light, a Monarch butterfly

in winter, perfectly intact, a wick in a pool of wax.

Sunday morning. Five churches open.

No carillon of bells. Four liars and one

that’s trying to face the facts. Bank, cafe,

Mac’s, gas station, a hospital with a landing pad

helicoptering the week-end’s heart attacks to Ottawa.

Soiled snow slobbering in the gutters

of a bleak street. Heritage fieldstone

refitted with aluminium windows, grandpa

in sunglasses where the old meets the new.

Among the local tribes, Scottish settlers,

Irish immigrants, British half pay officers,

even if you’ve lived here a hundred and fifty years

you’re still passing through. Good-bye. Good-bye.

Not enough dead in my past to be one of you.

A chubby adolescent primes his black baseball cap,

hitches up his pants, swings the door open

to the crowded cafe where there might be girls

as lonely as he is, and makes a hopeful grand entrance.

A grey haired woman darts from the bank

like a sparrow who knows her business.

Retirement capital of Canada, things advance

from accident to accident like the old woman

last summer who stopped her car without warning

in the middle of the road and got out to ask

the passers-by if anyone knew how to park it.

The lamp posts straight as florist’s daffodils

but one uprooted by a drunk, leaning like a mast

to starboard, counterpointing the upright by contrast.

An orange cone, thumb-tacking the spot

something happened out of the usual to make

Sunday worth talking about after the plates

are pushed away and the waitress comes to the table

knowing what everyone takes in their coffee

without having to ask if they’re from here or not.

Everyone lives as if they’d just read The Love Song

of J. Alfred Prufrock, though I doubt they’ve heard of Eliot.

You can tell by the way they walk how long

they’ve been landlocked beside the Rideau Canal

without mermaids, though they stock the lakes

with fingerlings of small mouth bass for American fishermen.

All well and good, I say, all well and good

though the suicide rate among the teen-agers

is the highest in the valley, I’m not passing judgement

from the God’s eye view of my upstairs apartment window.

I’m not logging the cadavers of dead trees

in the cemetery of a frozen swamp in winter.

I’m not trying to thaw the dreams of the mosquitoes out

beside the stove. Life here is a home remedy

for everything, mystic bumbleberry pies cooling

on the farmyard windowsills of rustic sibyls

who usually know more about what you need

than you do in the afterlife of some psychic catastrophe

and more often than not are uncannily right.

When it’s not being shown how to do things the smart way,

talent is quietly scorned by the schadenfreude

of incontestable skills that know how to fix it on their own.

Confess your helplessness with inquisitive humility

and everyone turns into Aristotle in a teaching cave

and shows you how to patch a leak in your radiator

on the cheap with eggs and pepper, or keep

the window in your woodstove clean by making

a paste of its ashes and rubbing it into your third eye

to get the soot and creosote off the way a poet

looks at things sometimes like an ambassador in chains

through a glass darkly, burning like a cubic cord

of green wood hissing at what the nightbirds used to sing

before the chainsaws showed up like a chorus

of morose delectation in the perils of insufficiency.

Better not to wear your surrealism on your sleeve

and keep your longings to yourself. If you get caught

crying out loud over some real or imagined agony

and you’re not a girl, things can get dismissively rougher.

Real men don’t waste their time feeling things

that can’t be fixed with tools. Fortunately for me

I’ve got a paint brush and a canvas I stretch

like a tarp on a pickup, though the poetry’s

harder to explain than the logic of metaphors

in a hardware store with emergency generators on sale.

Isolation’s just a red shift in solitude and my loneliness

is a small price to pay to get a lot of work done

like Roger Bacon in a woodshed without being accused

that often, of witchcraft. More hermetic by acclamation

than intent, an occupational hazard of what I do,

I’ve always got the river at night if I need someone to talk to,

and the companionable eyes of the stars to overcome

the cruelty of my cosmic cabin fever when space

turns to glass, and it gets so cold and impersonal in the abyss

even death shudders like a calving glacier when it realizes

how much holier things seem in my absence

than it could ever hope to be while I remained alive

to put the lie to it, like people in a small town, who survive.

PATRICK WHITE