IN CERTAIN MOODS I THINK LIKE AN ICE AGE

IN CERTAIN MOODS I THINK LIKE AN ICE AGE

In certain moods I think like an ice age,

relentless, every insight, the glacier

of a window on the move that cuts like a diamond.

I’m not sentimental about baby mammoths

falling into cryonic crevasses for twelve thousand years.

I could gouge out the eyes of lakes, bully the mountains

like a mile high waterclock with its pedal frozen to the metal of time.

Something brittle and cold as broken glass in my seeing.

A clarity that burns like dry ice born without a personality.

I can still stand in the bottom of a snakepit

and see the stars like the fang marks of so many strikes

at the scared rabbit of my heart beating like a strawberry,

palpitating like the sump pump of a toxin

trying to drain the sweetest of watersheds

like quicksilver from the mirrors of my brain.

Sometimes I feel I’ve been harbouring

the skull and crossbones in the piratical bay

of a subliminal childhood that washed me up

out of a fire storm onto a more ferocious shore

of civilized savages that take their time eating each other.

I can see as supraobjectively as a reptile from the late Triassic

the asteroid that’s heading this way

to shatter the window of opportunity

like an atmosphere that doesn’t encourage

growth in a greenhouse, but doesn’t mind

genetically tampering with cell tissue

as if agriculture had given birth, not only to war,

but to a mutated child that would redesign her.

Too many nuances are left out of lizards and lenses

for me to look at the world through their eyes

too long. My third eye begins to crystallize like a jewel

instead of a black pearl of a new moon

on the tongues of the waterlilies walking on the water

like the pale flames of the constellations burning their starmaps

like passports to anywhere they’re not as homelessly here

as they are now. And there are strange viruses

that can be transmitted from telescopes in port

like heresy through the gullible angel fleets.

People begin to see that the crystal slipper

fits the darkness better than the light

the way a star fits the winged heels of the night

like the Great Square of Pegasus, or Albireo in the Swan,

Al Tair in the Eagle, or Vega in the Lyre,

as if one size for a shapeshifting universe fits all.

Time eventually sands the hardest edges down

like a dentist drill trying to put new crown on the pyramids,

triangular sun dials get rounded out into circular clocks,

and the conceptual sabres of exactitude, learn

to hesitate like humans as their mainsprings go slack

and the tension wears off at trying to insulate themselves

like referees from the vicissitudes and uncertainties of the game

by being more severely disciplined than perfection.

A saving grace I received from my mother

who would send me down to the Fountain Lunch

to buy her a True Detective magazine late at night,

I remember the elaborate ferns of frost on the window,

and spend the rest on candy, though she was down

to her last buck, like a tree with one leaf left,

she taught me how to protest impoverishment

with a flare and generosity that flew counterintuitively

into the brutal impersonality of its defeated face.

And the air full of gleeful butterflies torn up

like an eviction notice issued with a mythically deflated smile

on the deathmask of one of the nabobs among slumlords

sipping empire with their tea like the East India Company

that had a manifest destiny for themselves,

and the obscurity of obscene circumstances for everyone else.

Not a comet falling out of its black halo into the sun,

but a post-demonic clarity beyond symbols

like a fledging learning to fly

by transcending its own wingspan

into an abyss a universe shy of shining,

absurdly sublime and intensely insignificant

as a childhood is, when it’s bruised

by one too many atrocities early in the game

to really care whether it’s disappointing its despair

with a little hope, or putting a nightmare to shame

by pointing out even the clearest windows

have been known to paint themselves

the world they want to see when they look outside

instead of trying to see it as it is without turning to stone

when it isn’t interpreted like sign language,

unless, by some malicious stroke of luck

some delinquent eluding the neighbourhood watch

puts his fist through it

to enlighten his tantrum as the stars

come pouring into the vacuum

like a sea of tears in reverse

where the tide of affairs is always

worse for the wear of coming in

than it is in the ease of going out.

Providence makes a grand entrance

then heads for the exit refused and humbled

by this sinking feeling the stars get

even when they’re rising, though fire

doesn’t burn its fingers on itself

that doesn’t mean it isn’t being consumed.

Or if even so little as a single firefly

of inspired rage is glowing somewhere

across the hard-hearted tundra, that’s the end

of your eyes being scalded by an ice age

that’s been freezing and thawing them out since childhood

until your heart aches like a raw strawberry

as feeling begins to circulate in it again.

PATRICK WHITE