THE NIGHT IS NOT A FRIEND

THE NIGHT IS NOT A FRIEND

The night is not a friend. The stars

are far too fierce. The clarity of the air,

the absence in a small room where someone died

in a cold tone of voice reflected in the mirror.

Even the snow is mean. Things are crushed

and broken that yesterday were supple.

The river reeds have stiffened their wavelengths

that used to go with the flow into hippies

that want to stab you to death with a tuning fork.

Ice scalds my face. A deathmask of glacial acids.

All the close-knit intimacies have migrated south

and there are bearfuls of berries sleeping it off

like body fat blacked out in sensory deprivation tanks

in the grottoes and crevasses of the hills nearby,

waiting for spring to wake up in a recovery room

as the raccoons plunder gap-toothed cattle corn,

semi-hibernating to keep things cheap and low profile.

Life rationed. The earth on food stamps.

The pike idling like paramilitary razor wire

under ghostly encampments of the snow

closing its iron locks like jaws on the river,

eyelids of depression glass ice placking

one of the main arteries of the mindstream

that’s lost heart for awhile with its own resurgence.

Wood chips and burlap on the roots of the roses

brutalized by the permafrost. I cup my hands

around a small poppy of blood I’m keeping alive

in a lantern of goose-down feathers

like a petty theft of Promethean fire

more existentially pragmatic, considering the hour,

than the eternal flame the occasional drunk

huddles around in front of the Parliament Buildings.

Hunger unmarrows my fingertips

like an amputated candelabra gnawed on

by the ghostly feeling I still possess my digits

and they’re not lying on the ground

like the skeletal twigs of a leftover scarecrow

that’s lost the use of its excruciating hands.

Bush wolves and muskrat abound. The blue jays

still turn upside down upon the hour

to peck out the skunk-striped eyes

of the humbled cuckoo clocks of the sunflowers

at their prayers like old ladies bowing

their desiccated heads in a reign of terror

looking toward the earth for sanctuary

in the tomb barrows of the star-nosed moles

among the chthonic gods of their ice-age ancestors.

Juniper shrieks like a bird in a flash freeze

of its evergreen plumage in the snow

and the deer mice thwart the fox

under its prickly wings. The frozen swamp

thatched by abandoned herons’ nests,

is trying on dead trees like the peg legs

and crooked crutches of a piratical age

of prosthetic miracles. My breath steams

out of my mouth like shelter for the night

over the heating grates on the sidewalks

of Old Montreal, mother of many homeless men.

And the stars, the stars so viciously clear

I can feel their abysmal impersonality

even light years away, growing nearer and nearer to me

from the inside out like a crystal chandelier

in an ice-storm I wasn’t invited to

though I firewalk on the enlightened splinters

and glass thorns of their shattered plinths

like a one-legged man learning to dance

the pain away as I shadow waltz with myself

in the void bound snow palaces of the shining.

How cold the dead must be tonight

under their blue-lipped gravestones.

The severity of the wind toys with my jugular

like the switchblade my father tested me with

to see if I were as inhuman as his fearless genes

to be worthy of them when I was three.

The willows scourge themselves with knotted whips.

The anti-rabid hawthorn lacerates the mind

with psychotic antidotes crusading against

the contagion of mad skunks and bats,

the improprieties of blind drunk foxes

that don’t observe the subtle protocols

of paranoid slyness and nuanced cunning

and approach you like the writing on the wall.

Subliminally guilty as long as I can remember,

for reasons too abstrusely adult for me to recall,

asking for forgiveness from an indifferent intelligence

I don’t believe exists for having been born without it

like a question without an answer looking

for a graceful exit without culpability or repentance

from this labyrinth of cul de sacs my heart’s

been twisted into like an emotional escape artist,

playing kick the can with the grails

the ladies of the night offer up to the moon on meds,

as they weep like dew on the webs of the relationships

they’ve woven out of their straitjackets and chains.

I’ve taken grim chances and subjective risks in life

that made the dice themselves close their eyes

and not want to look. I ventured everything,

and I saw it all. The losing was always more intriguing

than the boredom of anything I ever won.

I was disciplined by a strict code of disobedience

and though I could wear an eyeless life mask of albino marble

long before the paint wore off the lower Apollonic orders,

sooner or later the wild irises of my moondogs

began to give me away like the dark haloes

of my heretical upbringing and everyone saw

I didn’t wear rose-tinted contact lenses like those

they took out like phases of the moon at night

only when they wanted to close their third eyes.

The reptilian shutter of my orbiting telescope

blinked like a lizard with interchangeable mirrors

at the dancing stars that came into focus

like radiant wildflowers rooted in my field of view.

Came the rain and the fire, the tears and the desire

of the dragons of dark energy that looked at the world

for what it is and what it seems, the vertiginous precipice

of dangerous raptures where lovers throw themselves

like fledglings on the rocks below, and the unassailable valleys

that slashed through the mountains as deeply as they were high

like a razor mutilating a young beauty’s thighs,

trying to cut the pain out like a sacred syllable of lies

embedded in her flesh like a starmap without any eyes.

May the changing life themes of your own mindstreams

stitch them up in time for you to follow the scars and the stars

of your own contiguous narrative back

to the lost innocence of your efflorescent moonbeams.

Sweet dreams in the madhouse, ladies, sweet dreams.

PATRICK WHITE