IN CERTAIN MOODS I THINK LIKE AN ICE
AGE
In certain moods I think like an ice
age,
relentless, every insight, the glacier
of a window on the move that cuts like
a diamond.
I’m not sentimental about baby
mammoths
falling into cryonic crevasses for
twelve thousand years.
I could gouge out the eyes of lakes,
bully the mountains
like a mile high waterclock with its
pedal frozen to the metal of time.
Something brittle and cold as broken
glass in my seeing.
A clarity that burns like dry ice born
without a personality.
I can still stand in the bottom of a
snakepit
and see the stars like the fang marks
of so many strikes
at the scared rabbit of my heart
beating like a strawberry,
palpitating like the sump pump of a
toxin
trying to drain the sweetest of
watersheds
like quicksilver from the mirrors of my
brain.
Sometimes I feel I’ve been harbouring
the skull and crossbones in the
piratical bay
of a subliminal childhood that washed
me up
out of a fire storm onto a more
ferocious shore
of civilized savages that take their
time eating each other.
I can see as supraobjectively as a
reptile from the late Triassic
the asteroid that’s heading this way
to shatter the window of opportunity
like an atmosphere that doesn’t
encourage
growth in a greenhouse, but doesn’t
mind
genetically tampering with cell tissue
as if agriculture had given birth, not
only to war,
but to a mutated child that would
redesign her.
Too many nuances are left out of
lizards and lenses
for me to look at the world through
their eyes
too long. My third eye begins to
crystallize like a jewel
instead of a black pearl of a new moon
on the tongues of the waterlilies
walking on the water
like the pale flames of the
constellations burning their starmaps
like passports to anywhere they’re
not as homelessly here
as they are now. And there are strange
viruses
that can be transmitted from telescopes
in port
like heresy through the gullible angel
fleets.
People begin to see that the crystal
slipper
fits the darkness better than the light
the way a star fits the winged heels of
the night
like the Great Square of Pegasus, or
Albireo in the Swan,
Al Tair in the Eagle, or Vega in the
Lyre,
as if one size for a shapeshifting
universe fits all.
Time eventually sands the hardest edges
down
like a dentist drill trying to put new
crown on the pyramids,
triangular sun dials get rounded out
into circular clocks,
and the conceptual sabres of
exactitude, learn
to hesitate like humans as their
mainsprings go slack
and the tension wears off at trying to
insulate themselves
like referees from the vicissitudes and
uncertainties of the game
by being more severely disciplined than
perfection.
A saving grace I received from my
mother
who would send me down to the Fountain
Lunch
to buy her a True Detective magazine
late at night,
I remember the elaborate ferns of frost
on the window,
and spend the rest on candy, though she
was down
to her last buck, like a tree with one
leaf left,
she taught me how to protest
impoverishment
with a flare and generosity that flew
counterintuitively
into the brutal impersonality of its
defeated face.
And the air full of gleeful butterflies
torn up
like an eviction notice issued with a
mythically deflated smile
on the deathmask of one of the nabobs
among slumlords
sipping empire with their tea like the
East India Company
that had a manifest destiny for
themselves,
and the obscurity of obscene
circumstances for everyone else.
Not a comet falling out of its black
halo into the sun,
but a post-demonic clarity beyond
symbols
like a fledging learning to fly
by transcending its own wingspan
into an abyss a universe shy of
shining,
absurdly sublime and intensely
insignificant
as a childhood is, when it’s bruised
by one too many atrocities early in the
game
to really care whether it’s
disappointing its despair
with a little hope, or putting a
nightmare to shame
by pointing out even the clearest
windows
have been known to paint themselves
the world they want to see when they
look outside
instead of trying to see it as it is
without turning to stone
when it isn’t interpreted like sign
language,
unless, by some malicious stroke of
luck
some delinquent eluding the
neighbourhood watch
puts his fist through it
to enlighten his tantrum as the stars
come pouring into the vacuum
like a sea of tears in reverse
where the tide of affairs is always
worse for the wear of coming in
than it is in the ease of going out.
Providence makes a grand entrance
then heads for the exit refused and
humbled
by this sinking feeling the stars get
even when they’re rising, though fire
doesn’t burn its fingers on itself
that doesn’t mean it isn’t being
consumed.
Or if even so little as a single
firefly
of inspired rage is glowing somewhere
across the hard-hearted tundra, that’s
the end
of your eyes being scalded by an ice
age
that’s been freezing and thawing them
out since childhood
until your heart aches like a raw
strawberry
as feeling begins to circulate in it
again.
PATRICK WHITE
