IF YOU EVER GET BORED LIKE A DRUNK HILLBILLY IN PASSING

IF YOU EVER GET BORED LIKE A DRUNK HILLBILLY IN PASSING

If you ever get bored like a drunk hillbilly in passing

trying to shoot out the stars until you finally realize it can’t be done,

you can always do what I did when I was young

and load a mailbox with a love poem that slid

like another cartridge into the breach of a gun playing

Russian roulette with its heart and firing it off somewhere

in a gravel pit as if it were an art and nobody could get hurt.

Or you can join me here trying to arrange my bones

in such a way they mend like a cedar rail fence that’s guaranteed

not to turn into a bird cage that’s going to keep anybody

from flying in or out as they see I’ve left the gate open

hanging by a hinge like a lapwing entangled in vetch

with a touchy nervous system with a finger on the trigger

of a flightfeather that would rather be loved than right

as I take the pressure off the last crescent of the moon

I’m ever likely to pull and decide to go hunting with

a fifty pound test bow that hits its mark just like a camera

that goes click as if you’ve just run out of arrows and bullets

and have nothing left for ammunition but the visions in your mind.

That’s always been the sign of a true marksmen to me.

Click. And you hit the target without trying too hard everytime.

Though that sounds like a Zen essay in a hunting and fishing magazine.

Try it when you’ve got nothing else to rely on. It worked for me.

Now it’s just a matter of deciding whether I should dress up for death

or tell the truth, and just let things go as mad as they wish

like fingernails and hair reverting into Mandarin revolutionaries,

organically, atavistically, into the polymorphous perverse

of the seed bed of the sixties I was mangered by

when I rode a high hobby-horse all the way to Andromeda

and back, trying to stay in sych with all the looping

that’s going on like rain in a windfall of habitable planets

in a starmud puddle everywhere else in the universe.

Splash. Either Basho’s frog just jumped into the world pond

like a haiku, or another loveletter just got drenched in dirt

as you drove by so fast on my way to mail it

I didn’t get out of the way in time not to take a bath

in your version of a blasting cap of a fountain

I accidentally stepped on like a beaver dam

the road superintendent has been trying to keep

from flooding this road we’re on like a highway of tears

from B.C. all the way to Colorado, or Eldorado

in case we miss the exit lane where we were supposed

to turn off, according to the starmap folded up

like an origami constellation of Aquila in the glove box.

Apres moi le deluge is a megamoniacal mythic inflation

of a rejected ego delusion I don’t subscribe to

like an imperious young lover anymore, but when I pass,

it might rain a little to make the grass a little plumper and greener

where I choose to lay down for the long night ahead

like a white-tailed buck without a doe in a deer bed

to have a wet dream of how good it would have been

if there were any unobscene way I could’ve asked

to have her lying down here beside me under the covers

of this death sentence, to reassure her when push comes to shove,

I might not ever be able to get it up again, but I rejoice

in knowing that she can when the wildflowers come up after it rains

like Proserpine returning to the earth in the spring

where even here in Lanark the most white fragile things

like snowdrops and crocuses bloom through the ice first,

baby seals coming up for air after a long breathless tour

of the underworld depths without an Orphic seal hunt

waiting for her on the surface to club her to death

as if Orion going down in the west who used to hunt

ferocious lionesses couldn’t find any other way of making a living

than making a charnel house out of a beautiful woman’s flesh.

If I’ve learned nothing else from almost being as tough as you once

it’s so much better to spend a life opening your hand up

like the caress of a waterlily looking back at the stars

out of this swamp of a world as they pass overhead like an inspiration

than it is trying to act like a two-fisted narcissus still in bud

or a bitter green apple found hanging alone on a autumn bough

because it’s timing was off like its aim and it’s too late now

to let go of what kept you so small to be a windfall

of sweet habitable planets for the bears and the bees and the birds

or maybe a woman who just wanted to wander awhile alone

in an orchard somewhere and think of you and what you meant to her

after you’re gone, though she keeps her thoughts and feelings to herself.

PATRICK WHITE