SNOW ON THE STREETS

SNOW ON THE STREETS

Snow on the streets grooved by tires

into a bar-code. A band burning its first c.d.

Garbage bags humped against the parking meters

like terraformed drunks in an albino mindscape.

I want to sleep. But savage clouds are fuming

with moonlight. Oblivion’s sweet, my little death,

gentle as a snowflake but the prelude to it

is pierced by cauterizing anxieties

like a needle park for voodoo dolls.

I’d rather be a butterfly, a pinwheel

spinning on an axis through my thorax

but you can’t have it all. I tilt away from the sun

at perigee and try to stretch the night out

like a budget of meds for the month.

The dark’s a cool poultice that draws

the infection out of my dreams. It

sublimates my sorrows like dry ice

that skipped the tears. I don’t want to get wet

in an ice-age. Crucified by icicles

that drip like syringes in a limestone cave.

I smear my face in red ochre, blood

with desiccated binders, oil pastels,

and lay my prophetic bones under the firepit.

I place a great stone on my chest

like the weight of the world

to make sure I never get up again

but pain is a homeless ghost

and I don’t think, even with my knees

popped under my chin like an embryo

every part of me is going to fit

my place at the table like a grave.

I throw a few cornflowers in

and wander off with my spirit

like a thought wave that’s tagging along.

I chip away at my heart

like an obsidian lunette

with a bone that’s edging it

into a phalanged Clovis point

for a throwing spear to penetrate

the mammoth of the wooly moon.

I think I’m going extinct.

I’ve culled too many stars.

The herds are thinning over my head.

The green of the traffic lights

that turned yellow in the fall

drops its single, blood-stained berry in the snow.

As the birds and the bards say

of the chokecherries, ripeness is all.

Snow-blinded by this white page,

and blazing is a kind of blindness,

I want to leave something behind

for people to follow like the tracks

of a wounded caribou writing

in the cuneiform Braille of my starmud

you can read with your fingertips

like a hungry clan that hasn’t eaten for a week.

I don’t want to be sought or thawed out by anyone

who isn’t burning my fat in their lamps

or sewing my hide with a splinter

of my femur, threading my sinews

through the eye of a needle

stitching me up in an emergency room

like the mouth of a wound

that’s had its say, and holds its tongue

like the exhausted flavour of silence

masticating a wad of pitch and pine gum

like the sacred syllable of the spear point

I was trying to make an era ago

before I got stuck in this one like a tarpit,

an exile returning on a migratory journey

to the prodigal museum of my homecoming exit.

PATRICK WHITE