BASKING IN THE SILENCE OF THE COOLING
DAY
Basking in the silence of the cooling
day,
sunset in the blood of a snake on a
rock,
coiled into its own thermal like the
hawk
in the twilight eye of a peacock past
its prime,
I go out of my way, by the railroad
tracks,
where the adolescents lay their lives
on the line,
to accord it the dignity we all hope
for in time.
The acrobatic swallows have finished
their aerial attack on the cults of the
gnats
and now the nightshift relinquishes the
sky
to the dog fighting gypsy moths
and the stealthy dive-bombing bats.
Every evening, the same, their finest
hour,
shooting each other down in flames,
and the stars and heritage lamp posts
looking on
as if they couldn’t be any less
concerned.
Crackheads in khaki shorts pass me,
caps askew, and smile nervously at my
earring,
though they’re baffled by the cowboy
boots,
but it’s got nothing to do with me
whether they can read the memes right
or not.
I just want to mesmerize the ocean
of lunar commotion in my brain
by the rhythm of walking as if my body
held sway over the tides for awhile.
Rage, sorrow, love, my judicious
attention
to being fastidiously kind especially
if I suspect I don’t really like the
person,
just to keep the record clean with
myself
and outwit my pettiness just because I
can.
Goes with being a poet trying to live
generously
among thieves who’ve never heard
of magnanimous humans weakening
themselves
like the chiefs of the Potlatch as a
sign
of power leap frogging itself to the
top of the totem
by giving it all away with an expansive
hand.
Not really sure I understand it myself,
but I live a life of isolation in
between
trying to make things mean way more
than they deserve to or not just to
hear
the scarecrows mocking my absurdity
like straw dogs on the pyres of
existentialism.
Voices like scalpels in my head,
chainsaws in my heart, razor blades
nicking my starmud like cuneiform
into a library of Assyrian incisions
made by Ashurbanipal to cook the books.
Living in the twenty-first century
has taught me to mistrust all the
others.
Double back to the health food store,
up the road to Sunset Boulevard
that taught me how to paint moonrises,
five miles to Glen Tay and back again.
And if I’m lucky there shouldn’t be
anything
left of my brain by then but a
reflexive flunky.
Someone’s addiction is following me
like a rat in the shadows of my
ancestors.
My rotten father maybe, his rubber
cheques,
that deaths head of brutal alcoholics
with the insolvent grin on its face
that said I have nothing to give you
but violence and heart benching
wretchedness?
Or my saintly mother the day she turned
on me
for nailing Michael Jones square in the
third eye
with a stone David would have been
proud
to have thrown with such authority and
finesse?
And I still am for the way he
transgressed my fort
by throwing dirt at it like the Taj
Mahal.
My legs are growing heavy and numb
and I’m running a gauntlet of road
kill
through an ordeal of toads and
turkey-vultures
unravelling the complexities of the
dead
thread by thread until the loom is
dismantled
that wove the big picture of the
details
into a prayer rug of sectarian
wavelengths.
Man of my age, or son of an old adage,
someone once said I was born a hundred
years
too late, though late for what is lost
upon me,
if I’m already a century ahead of my
time.
The lucky day is when you discover it’s
all one day.
This specious thought moment of the
mind.
It’s all emanating out of the same
radiant
simultaneously. Nothing gets left
behind.
Haven’t you seen how the mountains
synchronize their spontaneity to the
birth
of butterflies like waterclocks of
being-time?
There’s no hour of doom for every era
of redemption.
My ends aren’t shorter than the
beginnings were long.
Eternity’s the rule of thumb and
time’s the exemption.
Ten miles just shy of two hours whether
you
measure it in tame avalanches or rogue
asteroids.
Coming back the way I went as if I’d
gone nowhere at all,
blueweed in the ditches, and
loosestrife
in the moonrise of the river through
the drowned trees.
PATRICK WHITE
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