HOME-THOUGHTS

HOME-THOUGHTS

Earth created lavishly here, spread out,

a canvas gessoed with ice-ages of snow,

glacial cataracts covering the third eye

that dreams in the seed underneath the eyelid

of a pine-cone, tacky with fire, of a mindscape

slashed and hacked out of thick paint

with trowels and knives and the double-bladed

lumberjack axe that deforested the moon. Quick,

violent gestures of life clinging in the interlude

of great ages clashing like continental ice-floes

grinding their teeth in their sleep off the coasts

of an unsalvageable consciousness crushed

like the masts of a matchstick flotilla of lifeboats.

Dark ores of a dream brought to the surface

for refinement from the underworld

of a jewellery box in the form of a coffin,

everybody survives by not looking back

like a fox in retrograde hunting a pheasant

that doesn’t cover its tracks in the snow

in the wake of its feather dusting tail

under the ochre smudge of the winter sun,

the yoke of a smashed egg at the foot of a tree

where the birds return like bush pilots

every year to the shattered mirrors of the lakes

like the sacred syllables of unpronounceable native tongues,

the silence still vast enough to be intruded upon

by engines and chainsaws snarling in the wilderness

in an unholy ghost of blue fumes infernally reeking

like motherless demons shadow dancing

around an angry campfire that scatters the stars

like evangelists of greater conflagrations yet to come.

We gouge and we wound. We die with the sun

and revive like the wraiths of thin atmospheres

that wail like the banshees of the northern lights

outside the frozen windows feathered in ice ferns

we look through darkly like albinos at the moon.

Our cultural life has pink eye. Morning here

is a bad fisherman that doesn’t take its own advice

and heed the warning of how nice the weather always is

whenever there’s a false dawn on the horizon

sailing under the colours of another country

that doesn’t take the black sail of the night down

or shroud the dead they bury at sea in the aniconic flags

that navigate by the starmaps of a neighbouring galaxy.

In this arcane darkness you learn to shine

by your own lights or you die in the cold

like an asteroid belt of boundary stones around

the firepit of the hearths and hardware stores

you’re buried under like an avalanche of prophetic skulls

that went out like a chimney fire of daylilies

rooted in creosote, smothered in a seance of smoke.

Human immensities dwarfed like the afterthoughts

of inhospitable harmonies reconciling the savage discord

of impersonal energies still shaping the world

like turtle blood and starmud in the abyss

of a cosmic medicine bag where the waters of life

break like a northern river out of a birth sac

that chews through its own umbilical cord

like a leg hold trap beside of a rose of blood on the snow.

Creation is always the first draft of an inspiration

that’s never finished revising the tree rings

in its heartwood as if the rain were never sure

of the genre of things it was working in

on a loose scaffolding of dead trees uprooted

on a mountainslope better thatched by snow

than water trying to walk across its own land bridge.

Coming home from an alien space

like a prodigal exile from a foreign land

is always like entering a new continent

where the large mammals of the Pleistocene

haven’t disappeared yet, and you can

instinctually feel the lethal glee of the moon

sword dancing with the sabres of a crouching Smilodon

when you relinquish the comfortable airport

of your arrivals and departures, and cross

the dangerous threshold of your homelessness

like a spiritual materialist with a knack for survival,

tricks on how to live like a snow hare in winter

that smokes the unprepared magician out of the hat

like the cherry red stovepipe of a Napoleon airtight

roaring like the ringmaster of a mammoth hunt

in a surrealistic circus of extinct species

that can trace their lifelines all the way back

to the mountainous watersheds of the Burgess Shale,

the Book of Life written in the fossilized hieroglyphs

of starfish patched like the angelic death’s-heads

emblazoned like coats of arms on the Canadian Shield.

Tradition just a path someone broke in the snow

like an offroad short cut through the woods

that wasn’t expecting to be followed by a cult

of snowshoes woven from the sinews of wild deer

like dreamcatchers in a web of empowering mandalas

that hang on every word you say like the suspension bridges

of community support groups across the Capilano River

of their vertiginous disbelief. We sway like silk

in the heights of our ionized ideals, aurorally,

and even when we don’t shed a lot of light on

what’s real at the end of a long winter, and what is not,

most people think we’re beautiful for the way

we treat our apparitions like the fair-minded history

written by the referees of the victors too polite

to crow in the dawn like Chanticleer in the windows

of another culture being exorcised by the teaching nuns

of another genocidal day at native school. The dominion

of Pandemonium where the fallen angels settle

like big, wet kisses of early April snowflakes

on the lips of the crocuses opening like the mouths

of baby birds in the abandoned nests of the great blue herons.

Goose-down and fur. We’re insulated by the covers

of books that were bred for the purpose

on a fox farm of eternal flames to wrap around our necks

and get us through the winter at the expense

of someone else’s nakedness trembling like a death sentence

in a purple passage of frozen poetic prose.

The cold cuts like a Medusa head of whips

biting you in the third eye of your peripheral vision

like the thorns of something toxic that wants,

not out of spite, but reflex, to lay you out

like a comatose junkie shooting burnt out comets

in a morgue full of falling stars and flash in the pan meteors

you can wish upon with one hand on the shoulder

of St. Peter, martyred upside down like a foundation stone

upon which you can build a church or cube the Kaaba

with a little dirt from outer space washed out

of the god’s-eye of a hurricane of razorblades

railing starclusters of cocaine up their nose

like the C.P.R. in the nasal passages of the Rocky Mountains.

There she blows like a narwhale in the Arctic.

Burial huts of gangrenous crustaceans in lobster pots

enflamed by the seaworthy dawn that hauls them up

like stars caught in the net of Indra, mark one jewel

and you mark them all, over the gunwales

of a waning moonboat that will disappear

like a bar of greasy soap left too long in the water

before it reaches the zenith of its swan dive

and goes the way of all snow like a Martian ice-cap

on a globally warming bald spot in the ozone.

Ancestral elephants carved in ivory like the tusks

of a moon that never forgets, iced like collateral damage

in the turf wars of multicultural gangland glaciers

marking the limitless borders of where everyone

came from in the first place like post cards and passports

from the edge of dispossessed nowhere stamped

by the monarchial wavelengths of a bureaucratic blood oath

that approves of your living and dying here

on the dark side of the moon, six months of the year.

Fewer Canadians commit suicide than Scandinavians

because of light deprivation. The raccoons wear

outlaw masks to keep from going snow blind

in semi-hibernation hiding out in the time locked

cryonic vaults in the suspended animation of a dream

where the only safe place is in a house that’s burnt to the ground

when the birds are falling out of the frigid air

in mid January like a Hitchcock movie made

in Hollywood North that couldn’t keep

the medicine wheels of its own spiritual flightfeathers up

let alone the lapwings of the alarmist divas

in the immaculate choirs of shadowless noon.

PATRICK WHITE