HITCH HIKING OUT TO RICHARDSON FOR DISCOUNT CIGARETTES

HITCH HIKING OUT TO RICHARDSON FOR DISCOUNT CIGARETTES

Hitch hiking out to Richardson for discount cigarettes.

A hundred and fifty cars go past, someone counting sheep

in a dream that’s got nothing to do with me.

I may look like a pauper but my vehicular inferiority

is more than compensated for by what I can see

close up and intimately in the grass, and the sun

on the brawn of my arms protruding from a tank top

like the Bronze Age. I’m a Mycenean setting sail

on the surge of the wind in the gladiatorial reeds

of the oceanic cattails at peace with the rage of the world.

The dusty white clay of the road chalks my runners

like blackboards of starmud in the Burgess Shale.

Six miles and I can already feel my femurs

starting to take on the air of fluted pillars

as my muscles stretch around the block

like hemophiliacs at a bloodbank gasping for oxygen.

I stick out my thumb like a spectator in the Colosseum,

neither up nor down, not the first nor the last crescent

of the trigger of the moon, one road in a yellow road

as if I had no opinion on whether the defeated

should live or die and I stare straight into the eyes

of the windshields like the Pythian oracles of Delphi

with no life left in them as they whizz by without breaking stride.

Nice try. Let them live. Empathy for the hell of it.

Swathes of grass the road crews cut. Rags

of chicory and Queen Anne’s Lace have learned to duck.

Mandalic starclusters, doilies of brocade

in an ageing house of life, have you ever noticed

how they fold their spokes up after they’re flowerless

like inverted umbrellas into the most elegant nests

as if they’ve been tooled like Faberge egg cups?

I look across the open fields to the albino scars

of the birch in the border bush rows of a Euclidean theorem

about where to plant the cocker-spanieled ears of corn.

I see neolithic villages in the spikes of the wheat

as I have in the bleached hair of the blondes

I’ve gone out with wondering if it’s the ergot on the stalk

that engenders the little tree of the magic mushroom

that walks you through the stations of the Eleusinian mysteries

so you’re never the same after that, and why

in Islam the staff of life is considered forbidden fruit

if it isn’t at least as hallucinogenic as the gods

growing paranoid about how much we may and may not know.

Candelabra of purple loosestrife, vetch and clover,

and the evening primrose that reminds me

of all those sunsets I spent cooling off in paradise

with a woman more earthbound than Lilith or Eve

who believed in the way I painted the petals

of English ox-eyed daisies the wind had dishevelled

like matchbooks some boy had pryed open

like people and steeples before they were ready to bloom.

Black rimless shades. Do I look like a serial killer?

I feel like a mendicant Zen poet on my way to Eido

in Tokugawa Japan, minus the hossu and the fan.

Life overgrows itself, a niche-dweller, in the culvert,

the fence post, the asteroid belt of gravel I’m walking on,

no occasion for flourishing overlooked, its stillness

in a hurry as I am not, the milkweed nursing

its Monarch butterflies, the pampas grass

preening its plumes like the quills of hieroglyphs,

what a riot of overstatement it takes to makes its point

as if there was a point to it all in the first place.

A yellow Mustang muscles its middle-aged paint job by

polished like an enamel buttercup, but it’s not

going to stop as it sucks the dragonflies up like krill

through its grill, cruising for sulphur butterflies

that gives it that jaundiced colour as if Van Gogh

had been eating his chrome yellow again. Avaunt ye,

knave, I’m the errant dragon knight that isn’t

going to save you from the damsel as she says

soft shoulders go slow before she drives you off the road.

Part of looping like an eternal recurrence

through time I guess. But, yellow, man, yellow.

That’s a bad guess. Don’t you remember what

Henry Ford said. I don’t care what colour you paint them

as long as they’re black? How wide does

that racing stripe of yellow down your back

need to be before you realize you look like the lines

of a passing lane? Not cruel, brother, just got to

vent a little at your sin of omission. Where do you

park your horse, cowboy, at the drugstore?

You ride on like the Lone Ranger. Tonto’d rather walk.

A raccoon’s severed paw at my feet, the catatonic full moon

of an empty Tim Horton’s cup trying to civilize

pagan Germania in the Teutoburg Forest, brown paper bag

from the liquor-store, I’m in the middle of a modern midden

that runs like a country highway through a landfill.

Who needs the NSA when you can take on the identity

of what you throw away? Don’t underestimate

the power of the earth to remember and redress.

Wherever you keep your garbage. That’s where your home is.

Two miles more and my lungs are alien atmospheres

trying to cling to a habitable planet like an aura of air

laced with diesel fuel, hot asphalt, carbon monoxide.

The Taliban of the wild parsnip throws acid in my face.

A thousand yards of silence punctuated by birdsong

flooding the woods after the roar of the long thought trains

passing bumper to bumper like Bactrian camels

on the Silk Road behind a driver asserting his will

by mean-heartedly doing the speed limit to live forever

like an accident waiting to happen to a self-righteous caterpillar.

The road grows long. I’m doing my time standing up

like a red blood cell on a pilgrimage to the shrine

of the goddess of nicotine at the eastern doors

of the burial hut of Smokin’ Eagles, until my bones are dust,

and my spirit’s gone south with the Canada geese.

Whenever I make a truce with the world

I stuff my peace pipe with tobacco and pass it around.

In another life I think I might have been a hookah.

I’d rather be killed by the thing I love than something

I didn’t have any feelings for. You can live

three lifetimes more a moment when you’re happier

than you can when you’re doing it by a book

you didn’t write. Still think its dangerously debilitating

to be too wholesome like the smell of bread in a denatured bakery

that reeks of frustrated capitalism. The angels

only know one side of things. They’re cyclopic.

The demons have two eyes like we do. They’re stereoscopic.

Who knows? Maybe I’m dropping ashes on the Buddha?

As an SUV pulls over to the side of the road behind me

with the smile of a friendly New Brunswicker

who’s been living in Innisville for the last thirty years

and he immediately puts me at my ease because

I can tell he’s the real thing, a decent human being,

and I start talking cheerful normalese to prove

I’m definitely not a serial killer. Peace, brother,

beauty, love, the sixties fifty years later just got

into your car and to judge by that light show in your eyes

you were there, as an unspoken vision of life

binds us to this road we’ll travel down awhile together

like two passing strangers as the night approaches

the simple kindness and sincere gratitude of the encounter.

All part of the spiritual evolution of two retrograde revolutionaries

looping back on themselves like the second innocence

of the return journey, better than the first,

like green wine from wild grapes that’s had a chance

to age the dream awhile like coopers in our heartwood.

And too close to death to lie, still wonder what

it was all about. Did it do any good? Have we lived it well

over all these intervening light years we’ve been

holding it together like god particles without sacrificing

the creative freedom that comes with being vast

and spaced out. Did the effortless meaninglessness

of our evanescence ever make a difference to anything?

A chaos of fireflies or a cosmic array of stars in the sky,

one thing for sure, we’ll be long gone by the time

the light gets to where it’s going so the circle,

even squared with the way things seem, remains unbroken.

PATRICK WHITE