LONG-LEGGED REFLECTIONS OF FORESHORTENED STREETLIGHTS

LONG-LEGGED REFLECTIONS OF FORESHORTENED STREETLIGHTS

Long-legged reflections of foreshortened streetlights

plunging their daggers like great blue herons

waiting with the craft shop Inuit, harpoons in hand,

above the man cover blow holes

for the occasional asphalt fish to swim by

or a crosswalk orca coming up for air

unmindful of the bleeding revelations

hemorrhaging like the tail lights and chokecherries

of baby seals being clubbed to death

all over the ice floe like a work by Jackson Pollock.

The day’s divinity. First thing you see.

But what if you wake up at night fall

as I just have, and open your eyes

like bi-valved, goose-necked barnacles

to the incoming tide of consciousness

and you’re not especially looking for miracles

but peering down through a grimy apartment window

you see this small conservative Ontario town,

with its clocktower too slow to keep up with time

and the spindly green insect of its spare watershed

elevated like the space program of a tall sputnik on stilts,

has been slumming in the Garden of Eden on mushrooms?

What kind of a sign should I mistake that for?

Is it me? Or a random paradigm of intelligent design?

Or maybe Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and the moon

are not aligned with the traffic lights

and old fashioned lampposts like nightwatchmen

glowing in the snow like the candled lanterns

they hold up on nineteen fifties Christmas cards

to show you everything’s just fine among

the beautifully snow blind and intellectually dutiful

trying to teach amputee fire hydrants

how to climb siege ladders up to my room

as if there were anyone awake enough yet to put out

like an unseasonal moonrise that went out on a limb for me.

First thing I see when I open my eyes at night

and I’m the unexpurgated prophet in the belly

of a beached futon, is the atavistic polymorphous perverse

trying to manipulate caesuras like green stick fractures

along the fault line of a zodiac that breaks

like an earthquake shaking its fieldstones of bad verse

into the emotional quicksand of stars in the eyeless dark.

If I ask for slim lifeboats, don’t send me

to the book launch of an ark after a first few

drops have fallen like dew on thin-skinned crocodiles.

Apres moi, le deluge. And the moon rising

to the surface like a white beluga through the clouds

after four hours of swimming in the brain corals

of a deep sleep dreaming of three stage harpoons

on a take off gantry for weather balloons

huffing laughing gas like dragons in dentist’s chairs

trying to put a brave face on all the mirrors in the house

that show me breaking down into tears at the sight

of the spoon running away with the moon

being cooked like moonrocks in a meteor shower

by a lab rat in a white coat that makes it look

like the plain white envelope of a loveletter

that lifts the moon’s spirits like the bubble

rising to the top of the Seattle Space Needle.

Or as Rumi said somewhere in an hallucinogenic trance

of self-annihilation, the bird of my blood

is rising into the sky of my brain. In my case,

the ecstasy of a hawk whose eyes have never

been trained to wear even so much as the night for a hood.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETIMES I LISTEN TO THE WIND

SOMETIMES I LISTEN TO THE WIND

Sometimes I listen to the wind

as if it were trying to call me home again

though I don’t really know where that is anymore.

Sometimes I hear the chatter of water

exhilarated by moonlight dabbling its feet

in the birch groves and I’m possessed

by the uncanny notion I’m listening

to my own mindstream as if

I were privy to some ancient secret

about myself I were the last to be let in on.

More than likely I don’t exist except

as this protean emptiness that insists

I look upon my own formlessness

as that which was naked now clothed by the world.

Good to go skinny-dipping in your awareness

once and awhile, resilver the mirrors of your skin

in water and moonlight, swing from your spinal cord

like an old rope over a childhood swimming hole

when rapturous simians were still as innocent

as their laughter at getting away with risking it all.

I recall the night I stopped thinking in the past tense

about memory, and she proved how creative she was

by introducing me to her daughters as if

I were a member of the band on stage at the moment.

I love wandering in a labyrinth of insights

the only way out of is to devote yourself

to being as lost as a gust of back alley stars

in the space-time discontinuum of your imagination.

I trust the dream grammar of my mother tongue

to find its own equilibrium like water

left to its own resources. There’s a logic

of associative metaphor that doesn’t dispel reason

from the genetic code of the irrationally inspired.

I look out on a cold night at the stars

and I’m wholly intrigued by the messages

I’ve been asked to deliver like future memories

to the ghost of what I’m becoming. There’s

a second innocence about the world that makes

the return journey even more beautiful than the first.

So when you show up out of the void

like the fragrance of a burning rose

shedding its petals like inflammable deathmasks

on a pyre of bird bones at a sky burial

I never conceive of you as separated,

gone, dead, unfeathered, or alone, anymore

than my heart says farewell to the passage of my bloodstream.

You’re not unravelling in my mind

like a stray thread of smoke from a wick

that put out the fires of life to follow a more spiritual path.

You’re as intangibly here in every breath I take

as a poem without line breaks is to me

when I’m listening to a visionary wind

like the sound of my eyes jamming with the stars.

And there’s nothing about your true features

that are any less real than I am even after

all these lightyears of trying to repatriate

this avalanche of asteroidal Orphic skulls

to a home planet that wouldn’t tear us apart again.

O what a joy it is to still love you as if

I’d never stopped sword dancing

with the thorns of the heart life strews on the paths

we do and don’t take sowing the past

with the first and last crescent moons

of the long nights we spent together

like lovers opening and closing their eyelids

at dawn and dusk to reassure themselves

the mystery of the other was still there,

Venus lingering in the darkness long after sunset

or getting up in the early morning

to turn the curtains back like the pages

on a calendar of last year’s constellations

as you are now, your eyes rising to the astonishment

of an old nightwatchman of the zodiac

spotting you looking out of a window to the east.

PATRICK WHITE