THE AMERICAN FLAG JUST BELOW MY STUDIO WINDOW

THE AMERICAN FLAG JUST BELOW MY STUDIO WINDOW

The American flag just below my studio window

one floor down, a real estate office carrying the colours

on the left and on the right, the Maple Leaf,

stubbornly clinging to its flagpole like the bough

of a tree that won’t let go of it even in a storm,

are both snapping in the air like two mad dogs

at the end of their chains, as if they smelled bush wolfs

moving through the dark without any respect for property.

Poor dogs. Poor wolves on a night like this.

Store lights smeared on the black asphalt streets,

a Fauvist palette, or the trail of a snail of lipstick

on a mirror in full eclipse. Everything tonight,

a jaywalker, a refugee, an exile, or a pariah,

with a mind shattered like pottery into any one

of a hundred ostrakons. No country for him,

his identity ends at the limits of town

as the willows rave in the asylum of Stewart Park.

The windows are rattling and the doors are banging

their pots and pans to keep the ghosts at bay

as the hard eyes of the rain sadistically whip my face

while the waters of the Tay froth like a troll throwing a tantrum

over the rocks under the Rainbow Bridge

that’s standing its ground like a harp in a rage.

Nocturnal greys with a tinge of infra-red in the clouds.

For anyone who likes to look up, it’s a night

to keep your eyes on the ground as I make my way

to Devil’s Rock, to watch the white mustangs

of the river run wild the way they used to drive

sheep through town a hundred years ago

before the coyotes and coydogs took their toll

and the vagrant hearts of the shepherds

found it a lot easier to go with the flow

by leading from behind with a couple of dogs

turning their flanks than I do tonight,

with a hemorrhaging heart in the eye of a hurricane rose

stirring the cauldrons of things up like the golden ratio

of galaxies and sunflowers thrown into the mix

like memories of better days at an exorcism.

Things torn away like children and lovers

caught in the turmoil and undertow of cosmic venting

that breaks the koan like a one-fingered wishbone

and achieves liberation followed by

the interminable solitude of going it alone

on a starless night out into the open fields

trashed by autumn after the harvest,

complicit with the storm, the pathetic fallacy

of the objective correlative that plunders my soul of adjectives

until all that’s left are these verbs gnawing at my bones

like a neolithic grammar of scarred calendars

and discarded manuscripts not worth another draft

with beautifully illustrated cave paintings

spit on the walls of my inaccessible skull

like shamanistic magic under a Hunter’s Moon

I can feel, even if I can’t see it, under this snarling

wolf-hide of clouds, from the inside out,

howling back in agony over the roadkill I’ve become.

PATRICK WHITE