YOU WERE A HOOKER BY SIXTEEN

YOU WERE A HOOKER BY SIXTEEN

You were a hooker by sixteen.

Your mother, your madame

The navy at N.F.B. Esquimalt, your john.

In the triplex, next door, upstairs

on a Friday night, all the windows

broken from the inside by whiskey bottles.

My friend, since you were seven,

how we struggled to keep our innocence

out of the world’s greasy hands.

Oil slick on the rose.

White peonies of blood-stained Kleenex

in the toilet bowl. Eclipse of the flowers

in a city of gardens. Even when the stars

were out, the darkness lurked, the doorways

housed strangers like trap door spiders.

Joy held a grudge against our wariness.

The windows didn’t trust us, and the street

was a firewalk of ordeals to test us

for things we really didn’t comprehend

but sensed, like broken glass, were crucial.

Painful to remember even now,

grey, grey, grey, the middle-aged children

trying to inch their way through the concrete

like dandelions or blades of grass,

or when it was wet, wrote their names in it,

each the founding member of a different slab,

gravestones with graffiti epitaphs

laid like bets against a future

that had been conditioned

by violence, poverty, disappointment.

The mythic inflation of human extremes

venting fumaroles of pent up emotions

entrenched like killer bees in their hearts

swarming the children in the agony of their perversity

as if they were always trying to get even with God

for something that drove them mad

with distemper and spiritual rabies.

Desecration always the answer.

Smashing beautiful things, debunking

the rare gestures of human divinity

that reminded them of who they weren’t,

fouling the waters of the children

with the effluvium of their own degeneracy.

I can see the chestnuts of your big brown eyes,

your helical blonde hair, your mulatto lips

and the pearl of your nacreous smile

when we walked through the wild broom fields

at the edge of town, and you forgot

how much your life hurt. Your mother.

Your body. Your corrosive acquiescence.

I should have made love to you

when you asked me why I hadn’t

and all I could say, because it was true,

I wanted to be different for you.

I wanted to show you what water couldn’t manage,

if you filled a bathtub up with tears,

you could always wash off in the stars.

You could burn off with light.

You could polish gold in the fire.

You could get out of the net

like the Circlet of Western Fish in Pisces,

out of the fetid uncleaned fish tank,

and see for yourself how vast the ocean is.

I didn’t know of a better way to be with you

especially when you showed up on Saturday morning

with wounds you’d keep to yourself

the rest of your life, and I wouldn’t ask,

it could have been anyone of a dozen men,

who bruised the beautiful blue eyelids of the rose,

and how, phosphorus and dry ice in my heart,

I wanted to give them a sex change

and turn them out like working girls on car seats

in the badlands of the Hindu woodlots

that reeked like seaweed on the moon.

Murder too good for the likes of them

in the ferocity of what was left of my boyish purity

I wanted to introduce them to the kind of agony

that feeds on itself, a root-fire, an inflammation

that can’t be contained by remorse or forgiveness.

Thorns on the roses they use to wipe their asses.

How many gates ago was that, how many

forbidden thresholds crossed, how many

long sidewalks you walked down alone

like a gazelle in the rain

with your stilettoes in your hand

thinking about nightschool

to become a nurse’s aide. Gone now,

noxious vapours from a street vent.

Heard you dumped a trick in Montreal

as soon as you got off the plane.

I went on to university which was

a different kind of whoredom without the fun

and then deepened my alienation as a poet

by refusing to forget about you

when I entered the witness protection programme

and disguised myself in my solitude

to keep the nightmares from seeping back in

like radon gas summoned to a seance in the basement

where all the bodies were buried

that had made their bones at our expense.

Still doesn’t make sense to me after all these years.

Surreal atrocities and ironic black farces

you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at.

As I get older, little archipelagoes of memories

surface from that lost continent of childhood

before it broke up and went its separate ways.

I take little doses of depression everyday

to immunize myself against the poison

of all those people who threw themselves

like bad meat down the wishing wells of the children

we did an unconvincing job of being,

so little joy in the way we looked at ourselves

when no one else was. Salvage and shipwrecks.

Time insulates and buffs, brokers and deals,

but it does not heal. You love someone,

and you loved them even before

you learned how to feel, and they’re in

a worse mess than you are, and you burn

to help them out like one constellation to another,

a bear trap in a marijuana patch baited

like Andromeda chained and helpless on the rocks

and you want to slay the inevitability of dragons,

but all you’ve got for a sword is the hand of a clock

and the courage of a badly mauled heart

and thirty-seven light years of remembering

your unspeakable silence on a Saturday morning

and the tenderness of you leaning your head

against my shoulder as we walked

as if I were the mountain and you

were the avalanche looking for someone

to hold on to you like a meteor shower

at the end of an era of one-eyed telescopes.

Hope you’re a nurse somewhere now in the world.

Clean sheets and a compassionate bedside manner.

Maybe staring out of a window on the nightward

at the stars above and the city lights below

as we used to look down from Mt. Tolmie

to see the firefly of Port Angeles across the Georgia Strait

like a sister galaxy, Messier 31,

in the Great Square of Pegasus

where I buried our new myth of origin

in that constellation I made up for us

like a time capsule of what we could save

of our childhoods, and never dig up again.

O but that fathomless silence on Saturday morning

like a black hole in the sunshine, and the sky,

the injured bird in your eyes, has taught me more

about the crazy wisdom of compassion

and the injustice of suffering before you had a voice

to shriek it as if your nails were striating glass

like a diamond-cutter or a snow blind glacier

or a mirror you clawed until it bled red roses,

than my last eight books and four awards for poetry have.

Every anti-hero needs an anti-muse of dark energy

to fire things up like a cold furnace

in a lighthouse on the dark side of the moon,

that doesn’t listen to its own storm warnings

and goes off in a lifeboat to look for you

as if I could still keep you from drowning

in a sea of shadows after all these years.

Three bells and all’s well, I hope.

Though probability’s seldom esteemed

for the prophet it is. You left me your silence,

as if nothing else could answer me,

and I’ve been listening in my solitude ever since

for the hush of your shoes coming down the hospital hall.

PATRICK WHITE