IF YOU NEED TO BE TOLD, YOUR PASSION'S IMPERFECT

IF YOU NEED TO BE TOLD, YOUR PASSION’S IMPERFECT

If you need to be told, your passion’s imperfect.

You can put the wafer of the moon

like a life saver on your tongue

and swear it’s flesh and blood, but little dog,

that straw piccolo you play like a fraud to convince

the garden snakes you’re a snake charmer

is never going to make it with the wolves

in the cold night air above the timberline

when they give up their rapture and their agony

howling at the skull of the moon

and the immensity of their longing for life to the stars.

Things not to do when you’re in love

and there’s something suspiciously dysfunctional

in the way your passion

doesn’t school you spontaneously.

Don’t neglect the details. All cosmic views

are seen through local windows

and it’s as important to know the colour of their eyes

though they change like chameleons and mood rings

or sullen mud puddles into clear blue skies with clouds

as it is to spectra-analyze the galaxies.

And if you loved the cloud at sunset and moonrise

and not the shadowless noon of her eyes

you’re not much of a painter

for all that you say you can see in her

if all the rest of the indigent day

your vision of her picture-music

is just a braille postcard you’re underpainting

on the edge of nowhere

as if you’d bought time-shares

in an imagination

that was always on vacation without you.

In love and astronomy

the eye by which I see the star

is the eye by which the star sees me.

It’s the same with men and women.

It’s up to you whether you’re a solar flare

or a book of matches in your lovers’ eyes.

You say you’re a player, but little dog,

the lions don’t lie to the lambs they lie down with,

wolves mate for life, and the female leads,

and you may think you’re in the Colosseum

with real gladiators and half of Africa

but you wouldn’t act the way you do

if you’d ever been wounded

by a woman who won’t fight back

or just as lethal, one who will

like an injured predator in the tall shadows

that knows you like the smell of your clothes.

You don’t think pimps get their feelings hurt too?

Or players never get caught at the casino

and taken for everything they’ve got out back?

In love even more than content

timing is as important as a bloodstream

or a reciprocal waterclock

between the lover and the beloved

that’s at least as accurate as the moon.

If you say you’re going to call

even if it’s just another s.o.s. in a bottle. Call.

If you say you’re going to show. Show.

Don’t let the wind blow snow over your footprints

and stop just shy of the front door.

Walk in like a revelation that keeps its word

because what kind of hick

thinks he walks on the dark side

like a sin of omission

or an anti-heroic domestic tragedy at intermission?

Little dog, there are three phases of a woman

you’ve got to keep your third eye on,

nymph, wife and crone,

thesis, antithesis, synthesis,

the triune identity of the universe,

three faces the Druids carved

as one white goddess

on the cold stone of the moon.

They’d take their golden lunar sickle

and cut the mistletoe off

their sacred oak boughs

like the medicine bags

of the balls between their legs

crammed in the case of mistletoe

with a lot of little moons

or in the case of your testicles

two full moons in October,

one pale yellow ochre, and the other, blue.

And they did this because

they knew something about women

you don’t and can’t

until one of them has killed you

and another one’s brought you back from the dead.

A woman can lay a cool poultice of moonlight

on your feverish forehead

to draw the nightmares

out of your troubled sleep,

but if you can’t feel

the mystery and the healing of this

as a gesture of grace

that even the angels envy

you’re terminal for the duration.

A dead end in a bus station.

You might fancy yourself a lady-killer,

a matador doing a sword dance

with the sun and the moon,

but, little dog, you’ve never been

gored so deeply

by the horns of the moon

that your heart bled out like a rose

no scar could ever bridge

because it was as deep and wide

as it was long

and went on like a river lost on the moon

looking for the holy grail

in a sea of shadows

with no pulse, no tide.

Syrian warriors in the Middle Ages

loved Damascene steel, perfume

water, poetry, roses

and gardens with underground rivers

and the Tokugawa samurai ninjas

wrote Zen haikus about the moon in the dawn

and seeing the whole in every part

and how if the cold

doesn’t go through your bones once

there couldn’t be apricot blossoms in the spring.

Would it be risking too much

for you to be as dangerously tender?

Not to guzzle. But drink.

Not to gorge, not to glut, but eat

as if you were breaking bread with a muse

like an intelligent savage

with impeccable spiritual manners

who knows what the moon can do

if you ever break the mirror

of the spell she casts upon you

and goes into total eclipse

turning all three faces away from yours at once.

You might replicate, abide, and die

but that’s as much as you’ll know of love

when a woman comes to you

like an open gate

and you meet her like a closed door.

Like the black dove of a burning loveletter

and you treat her like junk mail

you only read when you’re bored.

Like I said, little dog, the real wolves

who’ve tasted the lunacy of their longing

like a sailor’s tasted the moonlight

on the great night seas

of the beauty and mystery of life know better.

Tom Robbins wrote years ago

the mystery of how to make love stay

is the mystery of how to make the mystery stay.

If you need to be told, your passion’s not perfect,

but if you must be,

when she lays down her soul

like poetry before you

rise higher than yourself, little dog,

like Canis Major at the heel of Orion

and be a star of the first magnitude,

the brightest in either hemisphere,

and don’t smear it with your eyes

like two slugs on a mirror

reading a piece of dirty prose.

The eyes of a woman are the windows of God

whether you’re looking at them like a boy

or through them like a man.

Or she shows you her crone face

and all you can see is the void.

And little dog, I’ve seen you do this,

and it’s one of the worst things you can do,

when you come on like a puppy wagging your tail

and you finally catch a nymph in full blossom

in the prime of her youth

and once she’s picked you up

as something cute and cuddly

you age her so radically with your bullshit

she withers prematurely

into the apple piety of your mother.

This kind of Oedipal deviation

can make you go blind and impotent

drastic, tragic, frustrated, sarcastic and mad.

A billion stars strewn across the abyss

like the Milky Way when it drifts through the darkness

like the fragrance of a longing in lingerie,

and all you want to do, little Zeus,

is get back on Mummy’s tit on a cave in Crete.

But all that’s going to come of it

in the final analysis is

your bad, bad, Daddy, Cronos,

is going to swallow you like a stone

and time’s going to stop and dry up on you.

And then you’re going to look again at the Milky Way

and all you’re going to see

are cracks in a dry creekbed,

smoke from a distant brush fire

and a lot of toads stuck in the starmud

praying for a flashflood

as the sun slowly cooks them in a clay oven

and the kid, that’s you, little brother,

gets boiled in the milk of the mother.

PATRICK WHITE

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