Saturday, October 5, 2013

WISTFUL MELANCHOLY, UNFOCUSED HELL

WISTFUL MELANCHOLY, UNFOCUSED HELL

Wistful melancholy, unfocused hell. When
you get here, this hour upon you, this station
of ruinous freedom you longed for and attained,
extreme evanescence without the body for restraint,
nebular without any stars to show for it,
long past the beginning and too far to finish,
nothing to give up and even less to hang on to.

Everything you cherished and probably still do
enough to hurt you, keep suckering you back
into life as if you were being taught to walk
all over again by reaching out a few steps
further and further and further for what you want,
leaves you feeling undernourished, knowing
there’s no food for it you can eat with the same relish
you once tore at the flesh of an apricot
like the moon low on the horizon with your teeth.
The savage act of a mysterious, elusive life
that couldn’t be trivialized by an explanation
of its vital signs pulsing underground
as it lost interest in singing the dead up
from the grave when grief, even elegantly articulated,
fruitively matured into understanding how
it demeaned them by believing they weren’t
happy where they were, a windfall at the roots of it all.

Life shrugs. Things fall off your shoulder
like an avalanche of chips and bluebirds, angels
and demons who always had the better argument,
rank, identity, the world, a snowflake, the hair
of a woman you once loved so passionately
even then, when the dragon’s roar was fire,
you knew it would end with you feeling this way
one night like the long shadow of a bliss
that wouldn’t be bliss if it were to last
more like a watershed than a shotglass.

Still fall. Black walnuts rotting on the sidewalks
like bubbles of soot. The monarchs don’t sip
from the milkweed pods anymore, and that
stubborn little flower, chicory, just won’t give up,
however many times they bush hog the highway.
Stems detached from their leaves like
the slender bones of birds all over the sidewalk
as if they were talking to each other in an alphabet
no one’s deciphered yet. Violet asters against
the burning wings of Magian sumac when
the fire-god comes looking for fire in a shrine
devoted to its ashes. The autumn’s a sad furnace.
And me? Maybe it’s because my hair’s turned white
and the crow’s no longer dyed by shadows of moonlight,
I feel like a landscape smothered under the white noise
of wet snow. Not quite death but as close as you can go.


PATRICK WHITE

WITCHING THE SILENCE OVER THE CAULDRON OF THE TOWN

WITCHING THE SILENCE OVER THE CAULDRON OF THE TOWN

Witching the silence over the cauldron of the town
as the air conditioners shut down for the fall
and everybody feels something slushy
in their hearts like a bruised apple or
a rotten strawberry with unshaved stubble
or an exhumed moon whose fingernails
kept growing like a calendar of last crescents
after it was dead, as arthritic hour hands
reached out to cripple what they could not grasp.

He knows this madness well. Long, inbred
winter nights. Crazy farmers when the night’s
just right sowing the woods like the wind
from its seed bag, hanging on to the tail
of a black bull guiding them through the dark
like a new moon in early October before
the first frost freezes like a ghost to everything.
He lived up in Ardoch once and after two years
started to think like a rock. Hardness
made sense and the solid took precedence
over the real like a deer being bled
on a resurrected tv tower on a hill of skulls.
Recollected emotions like back hoes
and glaciers in tranquillity when the ground
he was standing on was too hard to bury the dead.

Smelt in the spring laid out before
eighty year old men with bibs on at the Last Supper.
Arctic cats in heat outside the lodge in winter.
He lived in a defunct hardware store in Fernleigh,
land of the bracken and the Shee, and sold wildlife paintings
to Pennsylvanians in the summer driving along
the 409 where Kashwakamak Drive meets the highway
and the cops parked to keep an eye
on the annual Outlaws’ three day pig roast.
The more surrealistic his life became
the more he understood magic realism.
He interfaced with the locals like a totem pole,
painting ferocious logos on the windshields
of their snowmobiles snarling like chainsaws.

He saw a black bear on its back, perfectly intact,
roadkill with rigor mortis, an overturned table,
an old fashioned bathtub with its legs and claws
sticking straight up in the air, desecrated
by its posture as the locals gathered to gawk
at something so powerful even in death
he was estranged by the darkness of the silence
that overtook him like an eclipse of the sun.

And the hydrolines strung out over the lake
the garden ran down to at the back of the store
hummed like spinal cords in the summer rain
like the staves of a musical snakepit thumbing a guitar
as Goldlilocks, the blonde minister’s daughter,
ran off with the bikers like an apostate religion.

He had a young wife with ingenuous breasts
as beautiful as a marijuana crop in the fall
to a rip off artist that plagiarized his macho
from comic books. Behind the deathmasks
fools wear to scare themselves into bullying
things they seek from the weak who won’t
speak up for themselves, is a crueler intelligence
alloyed like a sword with the lesser metal
of the inferiors its infernal power base is founded on.

He played Vulcan chess with a wolverine
who made sure none of the pawns on the board
took his queen for one of their own. He painted
six packs of wolves for the bandit pope of Fernleigh
who kept things impiously honest between them
and more than a bird bone flute fascinates
a king cobra, maintained a truce with a poetic mongoose
though you won’t find either listed in any guide
to the local flora and fauna. Nevertheless it’s wise
to be prepared for any contingency when
you’re out in the woods with a French easel
and a wife whose turn it is to be independently wrong
about the way the light falls on a dangerous face
wearing its character inside out like a police mugshot.


PATRICK WHITE