MOMENT TO MOMENT, IS THIS MY AFTERBIRTH OR AFTERLIFE

MOMENT TO MOMENT, IS THIS MY AFTERBIRTH OR AFTERLIFE

Moment to moment, is this my afterbirth

or afterlife? Old, or sixty-five years young?

What nebulae does my breath make

on the window of life, cold and diminishing?

Pre-partum depression perhaps, the apple

falls at the moment of consummation,

and the long labour of changing the rain and the light

into a time capsule for a material kind of eternity

is over. Have I fulfilled my emptiness? Or come

to the end of a useful delusion I grew fond

of believing? Whizzed past forty, made

a pitstop at fifty to check the oil and tank up

but sixty-five’s some kind of broken wagon wheel

on a black prairie after a grass fire swept through

the night before. Adequate to all the other

eras, ages, and nightwatches I’ve kept

oceanically enough to ring the hour and shout out

to the stars that couldn’t care less overhead

all’s well, I’ll stare this estrangement in the eye

be it the mood of the fire, or an urnful of dragons.

Let it turn me to stone if it has to. I have

warrior eyes and courageous wounds that made

a fool out of me like Don Quixote charging windmills.

A habit of turning skulls over to see what’s

on the other side, however beautiful the moonrise is.

I was a boy. Now I’m an old man. Is one really

younger than the other and this sad, medicine bag

of a body, the elder of a cult of one? My bones

are firesticks. My heart a cold firepit where

the Council of the Three Tribes used to sit

at the meeting place where the sacred rivers join.

So many friends, ex-lovers, objects of gossip

have died over the past ten years of probable odds,

you can’t help counting the number of springs

and autumns left to you on the abacus of new moons

that can be numbered on your fingers and toes if you’re lucky.

More declination than right ascension, I’m conjugating

time like a Latin verb, sum, es, est, though soon enough,

eram, eras, erat. Fact. Why deny it? This

is what it’s like to die as if your fingers were

being pryed open to make you let go of things

like flowers. My eyebrows are trying to

gently persuade me my eyes are going the way

of blackberries and dusty blue grapes in early October.

My seeing’s beginning to realize how organic it is.

The telescope rots. The lens fogged in by snow.

The heart’s a benign terrorist and cancer’s moving

further east like a Mississauga rattler under

the rose-hips of the cold sores on your lips

though you haven’t had a pimple in thirty five years.

Now it’s a matter of cracks and creases as the air

slowly leaks out of the bladder of skin you hoped

would keep you afloat like Bouncing Bet, or Lady at the Gate.

I chafe like a feral dog at the short leash my body

chains me to. I’d rather burn the kite than

haul it back in like some fish I trained to obey me.

Things have come to mean so much it’s suicide to care.

Kids have jumped ship. Women have thrown

a lot of rings off burning bridges, achievements

have grown no less ambivalent, and awards are filth.

Freer than I’ve ever been, within and without,

but the isolation is galactic in scope, and o

the lavender lies that cling to the light

like a patina of soap, bubbles in a hurricane

of thorns that swarm in plagues of killer bees.

The toybox is empty. The cupboard almost

as much fun. The government finally pays me

for being who I am, though I still don’t feel

I’ve ever been approved of. Did you love me, Mum?

Or did I remind you too much of my father?

Still a poet after fifty years. That might count

for something. Never wanted you to be disappointed

by what you gave birth to. Might be unlovable

but I’ve mastered the art of being dangerously wise

as a broken window with a liberated field of view.

I got out of the egg. I know how big the sky is.

Might be people I’m dead to, not yet born,

will look upon me as an eyesore they couldn’t

get rid of, they’ve stared at so long, given the way

things turn around, they begin to accord me,

as strange as I seem, an air of original charm.

My heartwood might have been a pulp mill

but my poems all have tree rings and birds

in the branches, and even in winter, the full moon

for a blossom of apple bloom in an ice age.

PATRICK WHITE