Wednesday, October 30, 2013

THAT ANYBODY SHOULD KNOW

THAT ANYBODY SHOULD KNOW

That anybody should know. Do you really
think it enhances and expands their humanity?
Ring one bell, you hear a thousand different
songs, a thousand different funerals and weddings.
Listen to one nightbird. A thousand different
longings answer back like stars. One skull
like the new moon in the moist earth
or charred by the fire, consulted in earnest
and everyone’s life is either a burnt seed
that boiled in its own beginnings, or a pine cone
that opened its eyes like a tree in flames.

We glean the same garden. We celebrate
on the same wind-locked gate. Until
something opens us up like the night sky
and we fly away never to be seen again.
The air leaves no traces of what it tried to explain
in the chalkdust of the Milky Way.
So many stars to be lost among like ghosts
of what they were. Firewalkers that didn’t
make it to the end of themselves. And never
would. Roadkill by the side of the road
when they lay down like a corduroy forest
built on an old Indian path for the mail lady
when she travelled with a horse and buggy.
Her bones stick out of the earth when it thaws.

A beached old whale of a store, at one time,
now empty when we moved in, poets and painters,
with five acres, and a lake that came with it
and the place I wrote in, cold and desiccated
as new dry wall and the studio as big
as I could want it, but empty and alone
even with you there to compensate for the silence
for throwing the jam and eggs the neighbours
greeted us with all over the kitchen floor
it was impossible to walk on for a week
of black ice between us for reasons I forget.

Does it help anyone to remember that?
Is the evil that genetically modifies their soul
made any less ingenuous than a retired
hunting and fishing guide that’s always
on the look out for anything to drink
even when it’s smashed Polar Ice
in someone else’s Arctic Cat’s saddle-bag?
Voldemar the Latvian tailor alcoholic
would think it was cologne, a cheap buy,
with an ice storm of a chandelier,
powdered glass in it like the staff of life
as the sheriff heaped his furniture
out on the boulevard where everyone gawked.

And the landlord’s wife telling me I was
Satan as I painted wolves for a living
every Sunday night after she got off church
coming to the door, a hypocrite whore
later to be discovered by her angelic son
doing porn on the internet. Survival skills
in the topsoil of the clearcut fields
that wasn’t good for farming except for pheasants
grown and slaughtered and flown all around
the world. People lived on fishing permits
but shot deer out of season, the occasional
black bear. Everybody owned a gun
but me. I grew flowers only the bikers
ever stopped en masse to admire the colours
of the zinnias in contrast to the white Shasta daisies.


PATRICK WHITE

THINGS FREEZE IN TIME AND AWARENESS

THINGS FREEZE IN TIME AND AWARENESS

Things freeze in time and awareness
more often than they used to. I stare
blankly at the candle-holder and the easel
and there’s no waiting, no space
for conscious intervention of any kind.
No comfort from love affairs I’ve mined
for jewels in the ashes. Halos reforged
from horns as ploughshares are from swords.
An existentialist would call this lack
of mystery, bleakness, and there’s no doubt
only a few flowers remain to the fall,
but I’m alone with things as if
they weren’t trying to hold back the universe
from anyone who wants in on the secret.

Five a.m. It’s still dark out. There’s
a red glow in the sky. Until her boyfriend
with decorative cab lights on his truck
drops the young waitress off to open
The Hideaway across the street. He leaves
and she walks right into the darkness
unafraid not giving a second thought
to what might be lurking inside at this hour
as if she’d been making serious love
all night. She’s the first bird to come back
in the spring, though winter’s coming on,
and death lets go of Foster Street like a spell
I’ve been observing, stillness through
the window, the imperturbability of things
at rest while the town dreams beyond
its explanations for how life is for those
who watch without memory or preconception.

To be alive simply and cleanly, sixty-five,
watching the heritage lamp-posts cast
static shadows on the parking meters
that never move like sundials or bloom
like galaxies flaring up from wooden matches,
(I’m writing this after the fact, so this
is the history before it gets to you
like the light of star, or the pictogram
of the Pleiades, Perseus holding the Medusa’s
ghoulish head in red Algol) and know
like a leaf whenever there’s this much shedding
something is revealed even the darkness
couldn’t anticipate after all these lightyears
this dead end, the gateway to an unspeakable freedom.

Cut free, somehow, of many things that
gave up on me. Disproportionate to my humanity.
The overworked apprentice free to play
hookey for the rest of his life as if no one
cared whether he showed up for work or not,
to explore the world as it comes to him
and not be looking for anything in particular
in the blue boxes stuffed with startled cardboard
that doesn’t contain anything anymore
it can’t throw out at aeons and eras of notice.
To see the dawn in the dingy blue ripening
over the rooftops and greet the day like a ghost
that’s beat death to the grave like a bet I intend to collect.


PATRICK WHITE