A CANADIAN POET SINCE YOU ASKED
A Canadian poet since you asked.
I’m madder than the landscape.
Glaciers have scarred me
retreating north like my father.
My heart has been shaped by neolithic
chisels
into a dolmen of Michelangelo’s David
with a silver bullet and a rock in his
hand
and the determination of a statue
who refuses to be intimidated by a
scarecrow.
The end of an ice age.
No leftovers.
The platter scraped clean as the
Canadian Shield.
Savage runes carved in rock by rock.
Older than the Rosetta Stone
my silence is indecipherable.
I mean marrow.
I mean broken bones.
I mean blood on the snow.
The moon comes like a nurse to the
wounded pines
and applies a cool poultice of light to
their limbs
in a season of storms
when the lake raves
and the fish dive deeper into
themselves
and the bears huddle up under their
layers of fat
in caves they’ve turned into dream
wombs
and I burn underground like the
root-fire
of a radical evangelist
among survivalist cedars
gathering under tents of snow
to be born again in the blood of the
Caribou.
There are more heretics in the
wilderness
than there are saints.
Whatever it takes to keep warm.
There are nights when my spirit is so
cold
it congeals on my eyes
like breath on a windowpane
and I’d say anything
without amending an iota of it
just to be burnt at the stake
and thaw the chandeliers of frozen
tears
that hang over me like the sword of
Damocles
or the brittle radiance of the Pleiades
where they pick glass apples from
sapphire trees
or the crystal castles of Arianrhod in
Corona Borealis
where everything turns like a Sufi top
but no one ever gets vertigo
and the Celts pay back money they owe
the dead
after they die
if you can imagine that.
I make a significant Doppler Shift in
my lifelines
and heaven sees red.
I am a Canadian poet
and my wingspan
is the sky over Saskatchewan.
I’m the firemaster of the staghorn
sumac
when it rises like a phoenix in the
fall
and then I’m a bird in the chimney
like a word stuck in my throat
I can’t recall
but it had something to do
with a wishbone and a harp.
I’m not the nice guy everyone
purports me to be.
I’ve got the manners of a mountain
and the emotional life of the sea
and if I seem happy to meet people
it’s only because
it sometimes gets as lonely here
in the vastness of this snowblind no
man’s land
as an icebreaker
shattering imageless mirrors
like cataracts in Frobisher Bay.
I’m a warm house
that opens its door to strangers on a
cold night.
I bond like fire and shadows to anyone
against the impersonal inclemency of
the weather.
That said
no man is Baffin Island
but there are foreign submarines
breeding like pods of killer whales all
around me.
Explorers have been planting flags here
for years
like artificial flowers in real gardens
but they keep getting lost in the
holocaust of maples
gliding through no man’s land
behind a barrage of pine-cone artillery
shells
to overrun the hill
like October assaultingVimy Ridge.
What the earth teaches us here
like a female warrior shaman
is the hard love of an exacting mother
that no one owns
and can’t be possessed by another
because she’s got thresholds like
timberlines
even a wolf can’t cross
and a memory like the Arctic
if she’s taken for granted
or real estate.
I am a Canadian poet.
White gold
from English ore
and uranium from the French.
The raven trickster of native lore.
The sacred clown.
The dangerous taboo
that lives too deep in the woods
for anyone to break.
I am a Canadian poet.
I marry knives like superstitions
that are meant to protect me from
myself
but the moon keeps baiting my love life
with sexual acts
to trap and trade me in
like the skin of a mink
for a double-bladed ax.
I am a Canadian poet
with multiple identities.
A multilingual polyphrenic patriot.
A chameleon with a passport that’s
turning green.
because it’s spring here
and the lilaceous asphodels are up
but the seasons change like manic mood
rings
and by the fall I’ll be burning my
i.d.
in a protest rally of disaffected
leaves
just to balance things
between Cain and Able
heaven and earth
murder and sacrifice
in a fair-minded farm boy kind of way
where everyone gets their ten minute
say before God
and then sits down like the House of
Commons
to break meat and wheat
salt and bread
loaves and fishs
or barbecued burgers and hotdogs with
the crowds.
I am a Canadian poet.
I was cooked like a kid in its mother’s
milk.
I grew up on the scraps they threw
under the table.
I’ve learned to sing
like a street corner guitar case
that belts it out
like an open coffin at the Last Supper
where all they ever eat is flesh and
blood
and I’m a desert on a diet
that’s not into moral food.
If religion wanted to do my generation
any good
it should go confess its accusation
to a world it’s misunderstood
like a child it won’t admit
is the issue of its own miscegenation.
I am a Canadian poet
from a big country with with an
aquiline overview
of human nature red in tooth and claw
and like you
I am a citizen of the same abomination.
I arm myself to go to peace.
I talk myself to death
instead of committing suicide.
When nobody wants to know you
what have you got to hide?
There’s no risk in being open.
And yesterday always tells me the truth
about why it lied to my youth
about why the windows were weeping for
the future
like a skull with glacial lakes for
eyes
and a place on the totem
they keep for the dead
where I just can’t seem to get ahead
of my own prophecies.
Here’s one.
Stick a fork in it.
I’m as done as a barbecue in hell
and that doesn’t mean I just don’t
feel well
it means I can feel the flesh slipping
from my bones
like snow off a roof in a spring
warm-up
and all I’ve got to live on
is recalled food for thought.
I’m grateful for everything
but sometimes it’s hard to know
what to be grateful for
when everything tastes like a food bank
or Canadian culture
with the government for a muse.
For nearly fifty years
I’ve burned like a furnace
with the mouth of a fountain
firewalking across the waterstars.
There’s no axle on the wheel of birth
and death
but for years I’ve been spinning it
in the mud
thinking it might go somewhere
if I drive hard enough
but all I’ve done
is carded and spun whole cloth like
Ghandi
from cottonmouths and fer de lance
meant to regulate the baby boom in
slaves
like a cottage industry.
Now the skin I wore
like Yeats’ coat of old mythologies
in the fools’ eyes
to cover my enterprising nakedness
fits like the shroud of Turin
in a snake pit of sewing machines
that keep testing my bloodstream for
plutonium.
It’s hard to learn to walk on water
when it’s high tide without any waves
and you’re always falling through the
ice
too far from shore to risk a rescue.
When I’m cold enough to take my own
advice.
I am a Canadian poet.
Second to none.
Because more than any nation could
encompass
I’m first and foremost human.
And though it’s my brain
it’s not my mind
anymore than the wind is
and what it thinks
is not my personal property
to put my name on
and say I own this.
Sooner say you own the leaves in fall
you can at least take a rake to
and gather up and dispose of
like junkmail that came to the wrong
address
than say this thought is mine
and that thought is yours.
You make a fist
of an open hand.
You begin to live behind closed doors
to keep yours in
and theirs out.
You concoct wars
that get out of hand
to change their children’s minds.
Wasn’t King Canute
and Britain when she put to sea
enough to convince anybody
that if anyone did rule the waves
nobody told the waves?
It’s the same with your mind.
How are your wavelengths
any different than those of the sea?
It’s like a star saying I own that
light.
And I’m the one who decides whom
it falls upon.
I am a Canadian poet.
The light is free
as it always has been
to create anything it wants to.
And though they’re my eyes
who can say the seeing
belongs to them alone?
You get the pointless point
of cowboy Zen?
I’m not a fountain pen
with blue blood for ink.
I say what I think without a blotter
to wipe my mouth clean of what I’ve
said
like snow melting on the red oak in the
woodshed
because it can’t take the heat
and wants to get out of the fridge.
I am a Canadian poet.
Wilderness flowers.
Fireweed after every conflagration
and columbine in the ashes
that didn’t know what else to grow.
And I suppose I should say something
corny
about wheat and beavers and maple
leaves and Mounties
and all that
but you already know and besides
at the bottom of all these totem poles
and reformed trees
that went to A.A. for drinking too much
I’m a lot more complicated than that.
I’m more dangerous
than any hardware store
you’ve ever met before.
And one thing about being born into a
country
with enormous natural resources
like a mouse in a well-stocked pantry
you can afford to be seen
being kind and considerate to the poor
or as I do
scream murder
when I hear them being killed on the
news.
Orpheus picks up his guitar in the
corner
and begins to sing the blues.
See what I mean?
It’s obscene to be so decent about
suffering
you raise both hands to stop it.
Every quarter given that was asked.
No surrender.
In this country that makes me an
iconoclast.
Stand fast in the name
of any deception you disown
and you’re an outlaw
bad to the bone.
In literature class
they teach you to kiss ass
anapestically
at wine and cheese soirees
making small talk awkwardly
across language barriers
with cultural attaches
after the reading
after the hour you spent
listening to cement
lament some lost cornerstone
that brought the house down
like the government
when she just couldn’t shovel
or churn it out anymore
and pretend it was butter
and good luck woman
made for the door.
He wants to call her a whore.
But he’s too nice for that.
So he talks about her poetry
as if it were as flat-chested
as she believed she was
playing to her worst fear
like paint ball
in suggestive overtones of camouflage.
A whole hour
waiting for one good line
that isn’t about making jam
or bleeding maples for their syrup
and how to flip a pancake like a lyric
over an open fire on the shore of Canoe
Lake
where Tom Tomson drowned
standing up in his birchbark
to take a piss
or being hit on the head with a poker
out of jealousy
and somebody swapped his body with an
Inuit
so its hard to intuit whose ghost was
left
to give the creative seance of poets on
tour
a sponsor to write about.
I write from the inside out
not the outside in.
I put the pauper before the prince
because I don’t like dressing up for
royalty
and my girlfriend couldn’t afford a
hat to meet the queen.
She was a hell of a human being
but she had rude hair
that wasn’t familiar with protocol.
She could paint like Frieda Rivera
or Georgia O’Keefe
but she was raised on welfare in
Westmount
and didn’t think she needed a hat
to go anywhere
except when it rained
and even then she didn’t mind getting
wet.
Things are so bittersweet here
you’d think everyone kept killer bees
and a hive was as good as a muse
to poets as dormant as smoke.
They all burn cedar boughs in a bucket
they swing like pioneer incense
to chase the bats out of the attic
across the road to their neighbour’s
house
who answers them in kind with odes.
But I’m not a turtle crossing.
I am a Canadian poet
with low enough self-esteem
like the sea at the foot of the
mountains
to compel me to abuse myself
by pursuing an earthly excellence
that’s always a threshold beyond
my material means to achieve
but works wonders for the spirit
you wouldn’t believe.
I can conceive gold easy enough
when I write like the Yukon
but I live like ore
at the bottom of an abandoned mine
that was staked out by alchemists years
ago
like base metal trying to strike it
rich
without having to be philosophical
about it.
I am a Canadian poet.
That’s not a fact.
That’s an interpretation.
And I’m turning it
like a jewel in the light
to see if that means
I’m the right man for the wrong
nation.
Nature or nurture.
Dynamic equilibrium
or the membranal equivalence of
hyperspace
blowing bubbles that pop like worlds?
The same eye by which I see my country
is the same eye by which it sees me?
I can live with the ambivalence if need
be
but what I can’t stand
is the artificiality of the collective
unconscious
when it starts adding flags and logos
to its archetypes.
Jung would weep himself to sleep
every night like a recurring nightmare
for years
or turn into an advertising executive
just to see how polluted things can get
when you leave the farm to an idiot.
You end up threshing waterlilies
and the engineers can’t help
competing with beavers
to see who can build the most dams.
I am a Canadian poet.
I think like Montreal
but I feel just like Toronto
with Vancouver for a spiritual life
and Ottawa for a conscience.
But I’m most at home in the backwoods
with flowering weeds and islands of
trees
the farmers circumnavigate with ploughs
with little things that go on in the
grass
as if everything that went on in the
rest of the universe
were of absolutely no concern to them.
One-eyed Zen.
Ants on the chicory.
The fox is in its den.
I can see more space in a grain of sand
than a dragonfly’s got places
to plant pot on crown land.
And I like the way time stops
when nobody’s watching
and there’s something ageless about
aging
I hadn’t noticed before
that makes me feel I’ve been here
forever
and none of my questions
about what human beings are doing
walking around on the earth
really mattered anymore
now that I’ve found a place
for my homelessness
in Canadian folklore.
I used to feel trivial
surrounded by so much that was
majestic.
Sunsets out over the Pacific
that put poppies to shame
and the savage pyramids of the
pharaohnic Rockies
too young to have an afterlife
worth the time and effort that has to
go into it.
And besides
who needs hieroglyphs
when you’ve got the Burgess Shale?
I used to feel small
scurrying around in the shadows
of the tall imperium next door
under the feet of a brontosaur
waiting for a meteor
like my only hope
to get this dinosaur off my back.
I don’t have the genes to dominate a
species
and evolution when you get right down
to it
isn’t much of an achievement
when all it amounts to
is trying to make up for what you lack.
In art that means
there’s lots of grants for ingenuity
but none for genius.
The first painting goes up on the
fridge.
The second jumps from a bridge
just to show them
how creative it is.
But that was years ago
when the only things I didn’t doubt
were trees.
I learned to weather things
like a whistling cherub in the corner
of a map
that tells you which way the wind is
blowing
by the gps of its cheeks.
I tasted the weather for myself
and found out all that rant
they taught me in highschool
about the pathetic fallacy not being
true
was just science’s way
of looking at snow like a labcoat.
I am a Canadian poet.
It really does rain when I do.
PATRICK WHITE
