THEY'RE HANGING FLOWERPOTS FROM THE LAMP POSTS AGAIN

THEY’RE HANGING FLOWERPOTS FROM THE LAMP POSTS AGAIN

They’re hanging flowerpots from the lamp posts again

like a change of stars every spring, and between

the young trees that held their allotted postage stamp of ground

on both sides of the street, through a long winter,

they’re turning up the soil in the whiskey barrels

as if they were digging up the corpse of a drunk

to see if he died sober or not or just accidentally fell in.

And I remember a man, used to live up there,

the second story window on the right, at the top

of a flight of sway-back stairs from carrying

two hundred years of the weight of the world

like the worn chakras and vertebrae

of a beast of burden that never woke

the serpent fire at the base of its spine

in time to free itself, but as the Arabs say

the donkey at the end

is in the lead when the line or the spine

which ever comes first, turns round.

May it be so for him who lived in a single room

for thirty years, cutting out pictures from magazines

and filing them according to their themes.

A testy, paranoid man, the black sheep of his family

who kept breaking his Faberge heart

on street girls who needed a place to stay for the night,

who could read his kind of sheet music

like an open violin case on a corner,

busking for the short end of the stick.

But it was love to him, and there were always

real tears at the end when he went back to his magazines

each time more bitter than before, to clip

the eyes out of the picture-music of his dreams

like dead flowers out of his bower of bliss in the spring.

He was a nocturnal man, half raccoon, he came out at night

to scavenge the streets as an unlicensed living off the grid.

Drugs, wallets, money, cigarettes, keys, condoms,

fancy jewelled watches with gold expansion bracelets

that had slipped from some drunk real estate agent’s wrist.

And then he was told he was going to die,

fifty-five, kidney cancer, six months at the most,

and I was awed by how he accepted his death

with the silence and dignity of an everyday affair

people have been doing unnaturally for millions of years.

And he gave his clippings and collages

and the most precious treasures of his lost and found

away like pressed flowers to people all over town

and when I asked him, sitting on the sidewalk

on the front step of his place, what he was going to do

in these last six months of his life, he said

I want to eat in every restaurant in town before I’m dead.

And he almost did, except for Mexican,

before I last saw him as I imagined he looked

under a closed coffin lid at a shabby wake

that pointed out which one he was

in his high school year book

with all the eyes cut out.

And you could live here for a hundred and fifty years

among the tribal locals of the highlands of Lanark

like an old testament prophet on a hobby farm

and still be considered too weird to sit at their table

without realizing you’re still not one of them,

though you’re tolerated like another fieldstone

in the wall with the steel gate that separates

one cemetery from another, not according

to how you died, or what you lived for,

but who you lived with on Foley Mountain

or in the back woods up around Fernleigh and Ardoch

where the people look up at the stars and wait like rocks

for the last two and a half centuries.

He wasn’t one of them, hardly anyone here is

where only the black flies are drawn to the smell

of an outsider until two days of intense heat

kills them off at the end of May, and you’re free to stay

as long as you like in the tiny one room

apartment of your mind, trying to make

strays and runaways stay awhile, linger a bit

on the last step of the stairwell

they’re climbing down from heaven on

as if life were the bannister of a free ride to the bottom

and that was the best a furtive creature like he was

could expect to snatch from life for him and his cat

and exaggerate into an expanding universe

from a single random atom of love

before it all imploded in on him under its own mass

like a black dwarf with nothing left to look forward to

but a black hole they lower you into like a dead lifeboat

into the oceanic awareness of the starless sea before you

with an admiral’s hat made of old magazines

that took the journeys you should have taken years ago

like the paper boats of Li Po down the Yangtze River.

Wary of bliss, because you’ve made your happiness

a nest in the depths of your desperate solitude

too important not to bobble the ball or the cosmic egg

like a translucent bubble smeared in sticky rainbows

out of fear of its loss, you can turn into the very thorn

you’ve feared most of your life is going

to burst your bubble into tears

that you made yourself in a hall of mirrors

look so foolish chasing it like the eyes

of beauty in the beholder with a butterfly net,

and when that doesn’t work, just as often as not,

stairwells of flypaper trying to catch the falling stars,

and put them in your pocket, and never let them fade away.

And he wasn’t a good earner with lots of candle power

so he had to traffic his experience for their lost innocence

like a blind lighthouse in love with fireflies

that could see him better than he

could ever see them or himself.

Love loses the mystery of the inconceivably real

once it becomes a deal in life, a tit for tat.

Most young women know that by the time

they’re fifteen these days, and especially the runaways

couch surfing in the archives of ardent stamp collectors.

But it strikes me as too facile for those

who are luckier in life and love to judge him

from a few snippets of gossip on the local mill wheel

grinding the gist of the issue down to something digestible,

and barely a mention in the paper worth cutting out.

And, who knows, maybe if he had lived as he had died,

offered a last meal, he should have tried

everything on the menu that life had to offer him,

stood astride himself like a colossus of a lighthouse

in the face of the storm on that dangerous coast

he never got to see, instead of sitting in his room

waiting for some mermaid who wasn’t singing to him

call him to the rocks as if she were coming to his rescue

like a black and white issue of a pin-up movie queen

in an old back issue of Life magazine.

And there’s plenty of people with more rocks around here

than they know what to do with to cast the first stone,

like the kissing stone of the Kaaba in the filthy hands

of the local Taliban at a romantic man and woman

trying to find some love in life in Afghanistan

just the same as they are in Ompah tonight.

But the only rock this delinquent would throw

through his window if I were ever going to

would be the full moon at the ghost of the scarecrow

breaking bitter bread with himself

at his own harvest table, to get up out of his grave

like a lunatic with a happier appetite for life and love

and like the longing of the crow and the wolf on the moonlit hill

call out for more than he ever knew how or what to ask for,

except in the way he died, nobly, without a word of reproach,

as if a long-standing empty prophecy

had been at last wholly fulfilled by the menu

of almost every restaurant in Perth,

where a blue moon in late October

served second helpings of a last meal

to a condemned man of no little worth to those of us

who admired the equanimity and grace of the way

he pushed his chair away when he’d had enough

and left the table like a pair of scissors

on the cutting edge of life for good.

PATRICK WHITE