I KEEP RETURNING TO THIS LINE IN MY CHILDHOOD

I KEEP RETURNING TO THIS LINE IN MY CHILDHOOD

I keep returning to this line in my childhood

I once stood in one dreaded day

every month with my mother

to prove I was loyal and reliable,

waiting for food at what was

back in the late fifties

called the Foodstall.

Though we were not animals.

We were simply poor

at the mercy of the God-wielding charities

and though it’s nowhere near the same degree

as it is of kind, we almost felt

like natives in the hands of the Catholic church.

Mostly separated mothers left in the lurch of love

with two or three whining kids

that were plague rats of measles,

mumps, ringworm, and cold sores,

agitated as electrons wanting to jump orbitals.

Natives, dried-out rummies

with faces like desiccated orange peels,

more alcoholics than druggies back in those days,

the addle-brained with psyches like quicksand

they kept falling into, some lambs

and some the tigers

that wouldn’t lie down with them.

Lonely bachelors that came out

of their self-imposed exiles

once a month to this lottery of foodstuffs

they carried home in a big brown

Vancouver refinery two ply paper white sugar bag

stitched together like the parched skins of mummies,

as if they were carrying a woman back to their place

like one of the Sabine maidens they’d snatched

to populate Rome with their solitude.

Women with too much make-up on,

a lot of them bruised,

their black eyes waxing from dark blue

to the festering yellow of ruined orchids,

as my mother’s used to

before my old man left for good.

A few boisterous madames

with chameleonic hair

that changed colour every month,

laughing and talking too loud

as if to show the more righteous among mothers

how free and flamboyant and flaunting they were

in the face of anyone’s disapproval,

as if they always had a trick up their sleeve,

though that wasn’t always the case

or they wouldn’t be standing there with us.

I keep returning to this line in my childhood

as if it held me no matter

how hard I’ve struggled to get off it

like a spinal cord tied to a kite and a key

that’s dangerously exposed to the lightning.

Shame. Humiliation. Guilt.

Though God knows for what

when you’re a child

trying to figure out what you did,

thinking you must be evil because you can’t.

Three hundred people lined up for hours

like a caterpillar that went around the block

exposed to public scrutiny

that felt it had a right to stare

because they were doing their share

and from the looks of things, we weren’t.

though I saw what bleach can do

to a woman’s knees and knuckles

when she was trying to raise four kids

by scrubbing a rich woman’s floors.

There are bitter moments in life

that can burn holes in your heart

like the Taliban splashing acid

in the eyes of a young girl who can read.

My mother could paint.

But not with her hands bleeding and raw.

Not with her mind and heart

scorched with anxiety

like a hot iron branding an ironing board

like another steer in the herd.

Even writing about it

I am depressed by the ferocity

of my boyish helplessness fifty years later,

as I stand beside her

to help her carry the bag home,

slabs of black bear meat

with tufts of hair still on it

haemorrhaging through the paper,

that would rip open

like the stitching of a wound

in the side of the lunar bull of abundance

Mithras Tauroctonus killed,

partially bruised vegetables and fruit,

usually a small bag of day old donuts,

two loaves of bread, leprous margarine

with a packet of orange dye

to mix into it for a little local colour,

sugar and canned spaghetti,

macaroni with powdered cheese,

brown potatoes sprouting

virginal green tendrils for tails

that made them like giant sperm,

would come pouring out of it

and scatter all over the sidewalk

to deepen the spectacle

of our monthly fertility ritual.

Everything was second hand,

even our food.

Even the way we felt about ourselves

for living the way we had to.

Everything shabby, used, abused

with an aura of ruin about it

you couldn’t get out of your heart,

your psyche, your clothes,

like the smell of death

in the upholstery of a car

where someone had died at the wheel

at the side of the road three days ago.

Street shrinks by seven,

pessimist philosophers by eleven,

even the children reeking of experience,

their innocence rooted like mushrooms

that came up overnight

in the compost heaps of life.

I stood like a pawn beside

the dethroned queen of my mother

and thought one day all this will be reversed

and those who were blessed

and didn’t pass it on

would later be cursed for realizing

too late the hard way,

that you really can’t hang on to anything

in this world of change,

this cosmic hour glass

shaped like lungs,

the valves of the heart

that keep reversing themselves,

that you haven’t already given away

just like your last breath

to make room for more.

Even in the spring,

even in the sweltering heat of summer,

wet winter days when the leaves

were plastered like collages

of artists in despair to the sidewalks,

after the cross burnt the scarecrow

as the strawdog of an idolatrous heretic,

we were always the last birds allowed in

to glean what was left of Eden,

before the hunger of winter

closed it down again and the tourists

went home to their homelessness with the poor.

And the seagulls and the mice

and the feral cats and the rats

that always seemed to have

so much more right to be there than we did

waiting for the loaves and fishes

to be broken on the hillside

though we were made to stand for hours

on heel-numbing cement designed

to torment your feet by standing

in place too long as the line

inched its way up the the front

like a millipede of people

growing nasty and impatient

to get what they needed to get

of what was left, then get gone

as fast as they could not to belong

to the bottom feeders in the same lifeboat

they’ve just been standing among.

And though my mother didn’t say much,

standing there in her isolationist silence,

there was always a troupe

of housewives in kerchiefs,

turning the trivial gossip of a reality show

into a running sore soap opera

they improvised from one end of the line

right up to the time the door opened

to let them in and they left the stage

to get down to the serious busy

of picking out the best turnips

and the less stale loaves of bread

suspecting the Elk’s Lodge ladies

had stashed the freshest for themselves

as a spiritual perk for all their altruism

that remotely tasted like vinegar

mixed with the deathly sweetness

of the canned milk of human kindness

as if one too many flies and angels

had dipped their wings in it

so that by the time it got to us

or we to it, it was an albino oil slick

from a cow that jumped over the moon

in total eclipse. Circus tricks,

hoops of fire with ringmasters

the barnyard made the caged tigers

jump through once a month

through the endless zeroes

of a slinky wound around the block

that had swallowed all of us heart first

like a multi-headed hydra

with a bellyful of hungry people

in a line that’s only grown longer over the years.

PATRICK WHITE