THE BLUE POTENTIAL OF A GREY, GREY DAY

THE BLUE POTENTIAL OF A GREY, GREY DAY

The blue potential of a grey, grey day.

The bikers have flown away like starlings

emerging fractally from the woods.

The driveway is clear though my car

is not going anywhere. They’re middle-aged men

the way I used to be, black leather

and cowboy boots where the rubber hits the road,

and though things take shape like Canada geese

rising out of a threshed cornfield, you run

like an unbaffled, four stroke wolf pack

that plays havoc with your testosterone.

Snow on the roof. Fire in the furnace.

It’s a winter wonderland when it isn’t a Quaalude.

Age is like that. It’s not a daffodil in late autumn.

It’s a Blackberry Moon given to heart attacks

and hemorrhages, an understanding the heartwood

shares with the tree rings that are keeping it alive

like leaves and birds grazing on what they can

in common, knowing the dozy tree never gets cut

for the keel of a ship, or a mast that will snap

like a dislocated hip on an icey, unsalted sidewalk.

I’m trying my senescence on like adult shoes

in childhood playing dress up in a dark closet.

More glibly, seance. I’m summoning all the ghosts

of the people I used to be, maybe that’s why

it’s grey, and I’m asking each of them what perishing

means to anyone. And I’m not interested

in tedious arguments, but I want to know

if they’re going with me into the legends of oblivion

at the bottom of a starmap. On board or not

with this shipwreck that would rather go deep

than far as the moon approaches the earth

cataclysmically every day it turns on its axis

like a weathervane secured at the peak

of a barn roof like a mermaid at the prow of an ark.

Initial response. I don’t want to lie

in a heritage cemetery with the leaves

passing over me and the grass always

an unusually moist green that’s supernatural.

I don’t want to be screen-tested for

my physical response to pain or disease.

Emotion always hurt me more. I don’t

want to be grateful for the idiocies

of the stereo-types I’ve had to suffer

at the hearts of lovers and well-meaning friends.

What did Yeats say he had to comfort him

in old age? Rage and lust? I can’t help either

when they arise, and though I’m supposed to be

forbearing and wise, I don’t object too strenuously

when I’m led astray by my eyes or repulsed

by the filth that’s caked to justice like a travesty of starmud.

Don’t help me unless I sincerely need it. Most

of the time that’s cash. I’m not muscled

like a rocking chair close to the stove.

Don’t bore me with your plans for the future

and I won’t bore you with my plans for the past.

I listen more to my body than my mind

when it comes to taking a nap which I admit

gets sweeter the more it ripens than I thought

it would be when I first conceded to longer,

less radioactive shadows than the meltdown

of my dreams as they ran out of heavy water to cool

them off like eyes staring too intensely

out of the darkness of the doorway like stars.

Not for lightyears schooled by a compass set

and a rule I learned in a classroom. I relate

to chaos in a larger frame of reference beyond

the surreality I project upon it as if my pineal gland

had stopped showing horror flicks on the weekend.

Freer than I used to be. Running out. Running down.

Until time stops at the speed of thought

and light’s just another also ran. Which bend

in the hourglass is upstream? I scheme. I scheme.

And what goes down has so very little to do with me.

I pay attention when I want to and get on

with how meaningless everything is, until

you give it one as gradually the fresco begins

to fade like a sacred roof over your head when it rains,

and the oils are bleeding too deeply into

the wet plaster, and the candles and censers

treat you as if you’d lived your life too colourfully,

and dyed it sepia-tinged, like a beer bottle

or a radiant stain-glassed window in a brown out

that played with the light bars in an art gallery

in Kingston that had a habit of playing dead

as if a black bear were in the neighbourhood

and death was the only way to save yourself from being food.

I’ve come to cherish my work as the less

of many evils, and much more fascinating

than the worst, like a junkie eyeballs the silverware.

I say starmud, but half the time I’m as big

a clod as I ever was when I pulled a plough

on the moon. I don’t underestimate women

in the name of love as much as I used to,

the stillness and the stealth of a halcyon hurricane

waiting to happen like an ocean in a rose

with the dorsal fins of sharks, thorns and sundials.

But God, I love the way I’m defiled like a sinner.

No angel that never floated a lifeboat down

a bloodstream ever had it so good as all that

like an incredibly long amen to a very short prayer.

And not mean, and bitter and cynical. Self

destructive as I’ve been for poetic reasons

I wouldn’t do that to myself. I might carry

vinaigrette on a long march with the legion

to keep from getting sick as an eagle on what

swims into his ken like Herschel or the Pacific

or a salmon struggling to make ends meet

and make sure the circle remains unbroken.

I don’t live recklessly enough anymore

to step on God’s toes when we’re slow dancing

to a song neither of us have heard before, alone.

Besides, everything is looping into its second innocence

like the moon on replay taking a bath in her own grave.

PATRICK WHITE