HOW MANY WAYS CAN YOU DIE IN A DAY?

HOW MANY WAYS CAN YOU DIE IN A DAY?

How many ways can you die in a day?

How many ways do you want to?

As if things had been settled once and for all.

No one to say farewell to anymore.

Grey, this anonymous day that does not

serve me well, though you can never tell.

Sometimes the worst is for the best. Fat chance.

No more excuses. No more alibis. No more

reasons for why dying seems so much

more sincere than living this waterclock

of a life constantly shooting white water rapids

without an oar or a raft when everything’s on the line.

More a drainage ditch than a device for telling the time.

Too late. Too late. Too late. No flowers in the fields.

No stars in the sky as a sign of things to come.

I look around. Circumspectly numb. Is this

wisdom, or just the calm before the storm?

All the snowmen are gone. Am I the last dolmen?

Tired the rocks. Of never having anything to build on.

Weary the air. Of this labyrinth of ins and outs.

And sad, sad, sad, this sea of oblivious awareness,

almost sweet, that accepts us as a matter of course.

The pursuit of an earthly excellence, even achieved,

isn’t much of a success in the world’s eyes.

You can hope, though I’ve come to understand

that hope like despair is often more of a curse

than a blessing. Like those little blue clearings

in a grey sky that somehow seem to make things worse.

Me? I turn to something like this poem

when I’m alone in the abyss in the absence

of any other way to exist except as a gesture

of absurdity, and maybe with no suggestion

of changing anything, an existential protest

against circumstances that progressively don’t resist

but insist nevertheless on a form of repressive tolerance.

On the principle that if I know the name

of my enemy, when my enemy is merciless,

a word, a single name, an atom, a photon of insight

is enough to empower me to transcend it.

But even that’s growing a little thin these days.

No insulation on the heart of the dragon.

No up or down to it anymore, just one long flat line

like a horizon with no rolling hills

bluing in the distance cyanotically like frost bite.

Stern the windows like moral lessons left unlearned,

grimed by the weather and the world. Real estate offices

decked out in flags as if they were the last

true nations on earth. Can’t even bury your dead

by the side of the stream where they caught minnows

in the early spring run-off every year as an excuse

to get outside, without somebody holding their hand out

pleonaxically for more and more and more.

I want to slam the coffin lid on their fingers

and make them gnaw on a crystal skull immune

to maggots. Let the maggots go hungry for awhile

and shrivel up and die like emaciated commas.

Further out at sea, ineluctably, the flood pours over me

caught up in the undertow of the providential tides

I took at the full but are now sweeping me away

like a mirage in a desert, salvage under the flying carpet

of this derelict shore. I’m somnambulistically

piloting myself through the reefs of a waking coma

and it’s better the less I feel what’s happening to me

than it is that I do. Soma sema. The body a tomb.

What could Orpheus bruised like deadly nightshade

by the glare of the unnuanced day, in for the night,

with less than he left with, possibly hope to attain,

his eyes adjusting to the darkness within, his voice

to the dread silence that wears it like a death mask,

but the right to exhume his own remains in a land

of dark jewels like the tears of the dead, without

looking back at where he’d displaced his own

prophetic head like a skull in the firepit of a moonrise?

Ably said. If the cold doesn’t go through your bones once,

how can there be apricot blossoms in the spring?

But what happens if the ice age keeps repeating?

Do these latter day dire wolves gather waiting

for the vintage blood, that tastes of fear and panic,

for a baby mammoth to thaw its way out

of a glacial crevasse that’s breaking water like a mother

that gave it the best she had without meaning to?

All these post-mature, amniotic fluids are turning to glue.

The waterclocks are slowing down. The lockmasters

have swallowed the skeleton keys of our ups and downs

like anchors in drydock. The hull of my moonboat

is being refitted with coral on the bottom, and sharks

in the nightshift cafeteria are playing ping pong

with my rudder and a fishing net in a valley of shadows

between the sundial and the sun, not one burning bridge

between here and forever, to stand on and watch

the river run between one extreme and the other

like a balanced approach to life that took the initiative

into its own hands like the ghost feeling of an amputee.

Orpheus remembered by dismembering his poetry.

What would the white-robed priests say about

exstasis then, if he ate of the little tree, the fly agaric,

amanita muscaria, ephedra, rust on the wheat, the apple,

haoma, or any one of a number herbal options,

and became as one of the gods of vulture capitalism

circling the sky burials of neolithic Turkey

where the victim is always a poor substitute

for the sacrificer? A scapegoat fattened on food stamps.

Or the ambrosia of macaroni and cheese.

O Great Artificer, explain that to me. How it

comes about that it isn’t the meat, the ram, the lamb

that reaches your nostrils, but the piety of the event?

Do we die and go to a foodbank for the poor

as unwanted at the end as we were at the beginning,

scraps off the altars of other people’s religions?

Do our bodies rise up to heaven like incense to you?

PATRICK WHITE