I SHOULD BE LIGHT YEARS AWAY FROM HERE
BY NOW
I should be light years away from here
by now.
Too full of shadows. Encyclopedic
sorrows
that keep updating themselves. Artistic
ordeals
that return me to the world stranger
than I was.
More alone. With my indeterminate
talent
for living through things like arrows
pushed
all the way through to the other side.
I should be
out of this raving asylum any day now.
I should be released like a beast from
a zoo
by a lightning storm that gnawed its
way through the bars.
My last attachment in this zendo of
mirageless monks
a rope in the basement, so as not to
discourage the kids.
When is enough, enough? Go ask Plato,
or better yet, Plath, Essenin,
Mayakovsky, Lao-tzu,
or that ingenuous adolescent down the
street
who shot himself in his parents’
laundry room
when his girlfriend said he wasn’t
fun enough?
Proved her right. Gouged his parents’
hearts out.
Me? I thought I could shine for the
eyeless.
I thought I could make something out of
the starmud
of my middle-aged childhood, that
honoured my mother.
One time I knew all the names of the
stars
in four languages and all their
symbolic meanings.
I taught myself algebra on my grade six
summer vacation.
One time I could be grinding pyrex
parabolic mirrors
with carborundum and a razor blade and
a lightbulb
and a catalogue of diffraction patterns
to smooth out
the angstroms for ten inch reflecting
telescopes
on equatorial mounts, and the next,
lighting
a gang leader from Hong Kong up with a
jar of gasoline
to get him and his buddies to stop
burning cats
or bashing their eyes out with baseball
bats
in my Pacific Rim neighbourhood. A
Kafkaesque disadvantage
in a cat fight. But I always had this
little black pearl
of hope in my heart to go back to like
a new moon
that said the spring is bitter, but
things are going to get
better sooner than you think. Green
apples
still give me gripe. And they’re
fallacious when they’re ripe.
Translated Euripides, the Gallic Wars,
the Greek Anthology,
seeded thousands of paintings on the
wind
like surrealistic milk weed pods from
the l0lst Airborne,
and written more poems than even I can
remember
that sit stacked in boxes by the
thousands in the studio closet
like the segments of a column I haven’t
assembled yet
to commemorate my campaign against
mediocrity
that no one’s ever heard of yet.
Pyrrhic victory
that would have cost as much to lose
as it took to win these spray-painted
laurels of tin.
Was a time I worried about myself as an
individual
in relation to the tradition of a
university literary curriculum
but now there are no individuals and to
judge
from what doesn’t get read of the
great dead
it’s at least honourable to be
acquainted with,
put a poppy and a stalk of wheat on
their graves,
no tradition either. Just these club
meds of verbiage
when the butterflies land on the lips
of their drinks
like cocktail umbrellas. Rimbaud’s
eternal cry
of protest against against the calcined
fossils
of poetry booking a reading in the
Burgess Shale
realities ahead of time. Merd! Merd!
Merd!
Like a serial killer stabbing someone
to death.
Nothing vatic about the random action
of molecules.
No hidden harmonies of earth buried in
the astro-turf.
No roots on the plastic flowers, no
urgent necessities,
no emergency transcendence, no panicked
search
for exits and entrances when the house
is on fire,
No mottled fools hoping to bump into a
holy grail,
No myths like the Mafia to back every
word up
with an offer you can’t refuse.
Nothing portentous
as a comet in the flaring of a
matchbook
of phosphorus red orchids with daring
red eyes.
Dearth. Vacuity. The cynical gratuity
of the gnostic gospels of comic books
no one’s going to read on their way
to the grave.
The dependent tolerance of
institutional paternalism
bringing the mountain down on
everyone’s heads
in an avalanche of awards and grants
that block the road between Terrace and
Prince Rupert
as dawn breaks up like ice on the
Skeena,
to make sure its forms are quisling
enough
to pass a jury if not the way to the
sea
of a more dangerous aspiration than a
crossword puzzle.
Here lie all those whose names were
written in jello.
Whose shrines were Campbell soup can
tins.
Whose heart bridged the existential
gaps
between hollow and shallow like a
reality show
that never went broke underestimating
human intelligence
as P.T. Barnum was fond of reminding
his circus clowns.
Poetry so fireproof now you could use
it
for the insulation of a crack house
without worrying
anything is going to break into flames.
Or Rimbaud.
Or a Chinese gang leader torching cats.
They’ve pulled the fangs of the moon.
No incisors in their mouths. No thorns
on the roses.
And work you could recognize anywhere
by its logo,
its celebrity brand name, outdated as
soon as sought,
cotton candy befuddled in Lindsay
Lohan’s hair.
No birds in their cosmic eggs. No Big
Bangs
to get anything started among the
membranes
of their birth sacs. Just this endless
steady state theory
of still borns deriding anything
apocalyptically
coming out of a self-induced coma
without a headache.
Want to hang the medal of the moon
around
the throat of a night bird, or a choir
of wolves,
to see how it estranges their singing
from their longing,
their immaculate solitude from a mob of
voyeurs
with the hasty tastes of a locust
plague of troubadours
that long for nothing so much as a
literary career
in a colony of towering termites, with
or without a queen.
The democratic revenge upon sidereal
exceptionalism.
The whole barnyard full of muddy eagles
at ground level.
Or being lead around by donkeys, in
chains.
And the muse? The muse never visits you
if you don’t sacrifice your first
best goat,
put nothing less than everything on the
line all the time,
and never having had a taste of that
kind
of apostate creative freedom sweeter
than sin,
you’re just another fly buzzing at
the windowpane
as if it were a vision of life based on
punctuation.
PATRICK WHITE
