A MAN SHOVELLING SNOW IN THE DARK AT 4 A.M.

A MAN SHOVELLING SNOW IN THE DARK AT 4 A.M.

A man shovelling snow in the winter dark at 4 A.M. The rasp of his shovel on the concrete sidewalk, a one-man power bulldozer pushing wet snow like a continental plate up into a white mountain range outside every shop along Foster Street. The parking meters stand like unlit birthday candles in the dishevelled frosting of a cake that’s gone to wrack and ruin. I marvel at the strength and speed he brings to his task and wonder if he wants to get home as fast as I do, though for different reasons, each to their own improbable course of events. Rimbaud celebrating his advancement into simple toil before he killed a man in Cyprus with a stone that wasn’t meant to. And remembered he dodged the draft and was afraid as far as unexplored Ethiopia. And though this might be a Sahara of white, an albino hourglass without a sphinx, this is Perth in the wee hours of the morning, and these aren’t sand dunes. And what I’m interesting in exploring is seven dimensions beyond a physical space which serves as a myth of origins for forms with beginnings and ends. All true explorers start out as exiles at home and abroad. And sometimes they’re even driven by foul winds back into the Garden of Eden like demons falling toward paradise in Addis Ababa. But the only destination I’ve ever had in mind was the road I was on at the moment, the one my walking made like a deer path down to the river, or the threads of the flying carpet I laid out under the horizon like a windowsill of the sky. Or like this hardy soul laying out a black carpet for himself that he’ll be the first to walk alone unencumbered like David Thompson followed by a lot of shoppers. I’m not trading guns with the natives, but I’ve armed my solitude, because the night is dark and old and dangerous. And hot poppies of blood have been known to bloom in the snow like the hearts of deer mice and rabbits. The only flower that anyone threw on their graves to mark the spot their body of proof went missing. But I’m not a fierce invalid home from hot climates. I’m more like a bull in the labyrinth of a snow blind zodiac, trying to follow my own star like one unique snowflake among billions that all look the same in the dark. This is perfect. That is perfect. Take perfect from perfect, it’s still one cherry blossom less than Japan, not more. But who so petty to quibble when they’re cold, alone, and starless as Taurus on a cloudy night in Eastern Ontario three days from the end of the old year coming unhinged like a calendar of new moons in the middle of winter? As if a door to liberation looked both Janus-faced ways at once and you couldn’t tell by the way it was left ajar whether it was letting yesterday out like a house-bound cat longing to give up its creature comforts to reanimate itself by risking downy death in the talons of an owl to keep its claws as sharp as its wits about it, or letting tomorrow in like it’s had enough of the cold pillow it’s been dreaming on for rescue like the Frobisher expedition in Hudson’s Bay. But no one can say what’s either side of the doorway until they walk through it. And suddenly I see the man on the street with a snow shovel as an anonymous guru clearing a compassionate pathway up to it for those who aren’t awake yet, and just as the waterbirds leave no trace, or Keats wrote his name in water, so the footprints of those who are, follow the river in deep unperturbed snow are soon erased by the wind like a starmap in a gust of constellations too numerous to name as if to imply, you’re free to make your own zodiac up and follow it like a planet through as many signs as you want. Because even when you’re lost and alone in your own private ice age, looking for the watershed of the Great Lakes like a glacier that gouged its own eyes out of the Canadian Shield like the moon to find its way home, the way this world is put together in all eleven dimensions, like a star, a snowflake, a poet haunting the ghost of his breath like a spring thaw, or a man with a shovel digging the world out of a jam on his own, up close or at a distance, you’re somebody’s myth of origin, inspiration, direction, extra dimension, even if you don’t know you are.

PATRICK WHITE