MOSTLY SAD

MOSTLY SAD

Mostly sad. Long dolorous drops of molten bells

tired of calling the faithful to prayer

and the cannon getting all of the attention.

No particular beef with life and only a few in it.

I’m reading poetry on my sixty-fourth birthday Saturday night

for my supper and the Canada Council.

A sticker for my license plate so I don’t get taken

off the road by a cop at a traffic stop,

and maybe, though it’s doubtful,

a free day or two to write without,

at this old stump of a desk like a snow hare,

the ferocious exigencies of an underwhelming reality

they haven’t found on the grid of their corporate greed yet.

Always try to put my heart into it

but right now I’m using my three and a half pounds

of cranial starmud as a doorstop to all my stargates

and I don’t really care whether or not

communication is blocked between me

and the fire hydrants sitting along the street

like squat little walk-in gurus with nothing else to do

when the Sky Dragon Restaurant isn’t setting itself on fire

but meditate full lotus while the heritage lamp posts

pray with their heads bowed like narcissi and daffodils.

And if you were to ask me how I was feeling

I’d probably say, today, all my emotions

are smoke without fire. Candle wax in daylight

with a little black wick in the middle

disgruntled it isn’t a fuse that’s lighting anything up.

Wonder if anyone else ever feels sometimes

their life’s a consolation prize that doesn’t console?

A rare singularity at the bottom of a black hole?

One of four prizes at the bottom of a crackerjack box?

Today stale bread has more character than I do

but, hey, it isn’t time to start feeding the pigeons

in Stewart Park yet, or filling a bucket of wild oats

I’ll still be sowing in the grave, to feed

Ian Miller’s big brass statue of Big Ben

leaping through the spotlight of a prime time moon.

Got one friend I can openly talk to in this town.

He’s a carpenter-cook and brings me dinner

when I’m down. He’s a man of the people

and I’m a somewhat embittered not so sacred warrior clown

surrealistically committed to writing things down

like a waterclock from one window to the next

as if my seeing were shapeshifting time

and I could take Arcturus going down

over the tarpaper rooftops of Perth

and burn it into my hard drive like an asterisk

on the computer screen of my third eye.

Live behind windows most of the time

like a deus ex machina with my three goldfish

in an aquarium because I don’t want

to be estranged by the conciliatory looks

on the faces of the workaday people’s souls

as I explain how hard I work like a madman

for half a century now, at not making a living.

And they all say, don’t worry, because they’ve

seen the movie of the agony and the ecstasy,

you’ll be rich after your dead, and it feels

like a community slap on the back of a corpse.

I don’t try to pour the ocean into a teacup anymore

and intuitively take the measure of everybody’s skull

like a phrenologist looking for the brim of the brow

to determine what’s full for them, and to each,

like a vapour of mist rising off a morning lake,

or a sunami of stars like the Milky Way, I pour

Zen tea out like a Japanese Chanoyu ceremony

and talk about how you can turn anything you do in life

from making a chair, to raising a baby, or driving a back hoe

into the do of an enlightenment path. Nor is a calling

a job or a career you could marry to your daughter

and be happy about, though way too many poets

seem to have forgotten that in the pursuit of their hobby.

If you’re not dying or living for it like a junkie, you’re a liar.

Insincere. Sine cera. A bust of Caesar made of wax

because there wasn’t time before the triumph

to finish it in marble. And if you get caught,

it would be wise to make him laugh at your duplicity

or your effigy could be next. Just a thought.

PATRICK WHITE