BLACKBERRIES AND SALMON

BLACKBERRIES AND SALMON

Blackberries and salmon. Sea-logged books of sitka spruce

drying like an expurgated library in the sun.

I’ll never forgive what went on out of the corner of my eye

like a wolf spider weaving a space-time continuum

over the black hole of a guitar carved out of my heartwood

to play desperately sad songs under my breath,

or the pods of blackfish that came in on the tide

to upend my flotilla of lifeboats. Matriculated Eden,

I owe half my childhood to pears yellowing in the moonrise

of abandoned orchards. Dusty blue patina on the plums,

nothing worse than misery in paradise, waking up

in the land of the lotus-eaters, imperial teachers

mean with under reaching their unappreciated selves

two masts down like rungs on the rope ladders

of the British navy moored to its trophy lines,

saline and sour about having to make it big provincially

in the London of the Pacific, born dead on arrival.

For many years I was a by stander in my own country,

happy if some beknighted nitwit patronized me

for disappointing his colonial expectations

of never being surpassed by an excellence he couldn’t disown.

Supercilious waterclocks on Greenwich Mean Time,

I was closer to the dateline than the prime meridian,

but everybody entertained an imported point of view

like Japanese fishing buoys that washed ashore

among the kelp and the cormorants after they

almost drowned, when the tug-boats died of exhaustion

hauling the British Empire up on beach

like the corpse of a whale with no message

from a celestial fortune-cookie stowed away inside.

Fish straight from the docks, potatoes

from the processing plant on Market Street

that scraped, bruised, keel-hauled and gouged them

like asteroids in the Oort belt rinsing off their starmud

for bagging, and the little old ladies of the Uplands

among their broom and lilac, their sunburnt arbutus

peeling off gnostic gospels of skin, as my mother

bleached her knuckles and knees like a lobster

thrown into the boiling point live as she screamed

like the San Andreas fault for revolutionary earthquakes

to put an end to washing her misery off their kitchen floors

and throwing out good food, far too rich for the poor.

I begged for her disarmingly, flaunting the expertise

of my innocence. Peanut butter by the bucketful,

I looked for castaway beer bottles in the Sikh woodlots

like holy grails you had to disgorge the condoms out of

like the moon shedding the phases of a snake.

I learned more about comparative religion

in the valleys of degradation than a garden on a hill of skulls.

A thief of flowers, I brought the vermillion

to the palette of her green thumb and no one asked

too many questions when the grandsons

of my mother’s employer were dragged

from the golden chariots they rode through our slums

as a reminder of their mean-hearted casuistic mortality.

Deviated septums and blood-caked craniums,

but not a prophetic skull among them to read the signs.

Nothing worth wasting a good death mask on.

There are child labourers born into life whose job it is

to have no hope so the indifferent can actualize

their dreams as effortlessly as they took them for granted.

Atrocities looking for reality shows forty years later.

Hydrocephalic perverts asking for a change of waiters.

Reading Mesopotamian history as escapist literature,

I learned to take the absurd in stride with unassuming nonchalance

as my mother burnt the last piece of furniture

to keep the furnace alive like a domestic crematorium.

Evening in Paris perfumes in mystically blue bottles,

new paints for the calling she gave up

like a futuristic fossil of the life she would never

return to, stored in portly steamer trunks

that never made the crossing back to paradise

like a salmon run trying to swim back up Mt. Kosciusko.

Not a horror story you couldn’t resist, but I wouldn’t want you

to meet my father after he’d drank away every advantage in life,

unlike his kids, to end up topping trees in a logging camp

outside Jordan River, where the cougars were known

to jump through the windows, and he tore the door down

to teach my mother to bleed appropriately

like an emergency ambulance for kicking him out.

Hell of a man. Though he never suffered as much

with a chain saw in his hands as we did

wondering which of a hundred compound eyes

with multiple lenses for hospital windows

our mother was in when we looked up to see

if we were orphans at the mercy of uniformed social workers

with no idea how to live, and less how to love

like the bitch mother of a litter of timber wolves

howling outside her room, down below, live, please, live.

Not that it made much of a difference to the arachnids.

Light years away dusk must surely have fallen by now

like California poppies and the wild sea roses.

The shaggy garments of the western red cedars

stripped bare to the limbs as someone plays a xylophone

like a log boom knocking bones on the headstones

in a drowned sailor’s cemetery. A roll of the dice

and the breakers are all froth and spume against the rocks

in the back alleys of the Times Colonist loading docks

gambling at lunch for another chance to lose big time.

Five dead men by the age of seven my eyes

were undertakers calloused by the diffident glare of death

trying to mean too much to a child who couldn’t care less.

Less soggy stars out east than there, but they

were the first magnitude mermaids on the rocks

to sing to me about an ocean of light I could plausibly

drown in off the coasts of my island galaxy

without ever remorsefully turning the tide against me.

There are those who go along with the stream

even when it’s an undertow and those who hug the shore

like arthopods and sand fleas clicking like stone castanets

who never learned to dance with wings on their heels.

Those who swim and those who burrow like toledo worms

in the hulls of landlocked ships that have never sailed the moon

and rust like blood leaking from the eye holes of their anchors.

Even in a Pacific storm it’s not wise to seek shelter

from your homelessness for fear of dying in a lighthouse.

Chaos is always a habitat bigger than any mere domicile

could ever understand without going under like a dolphin

in a fishing net translated by happenstance into a constellation

on a blue star globe between Vulpecula, the fox, and Pegasus,

the flying horse, with Job’s Coffin, like the asterism

of a lifeboat buried in its heart like a Viking funeral ship

to run silent, run deep, without striking a warning

the fiddleheads of the dragons and the blackfish are back.

So many years listening to the nightwinds rave

until the squall was spent and and the turbulent dawn

returned the wheel like a zodiac to its antiquated star charts

trying to cross the bar like the last remaining threshold

of the Knights Templar burned alive at the stakes

they lashed themselves to recant their confessions

to the waterclocks in the choirs of anachronistic mermaids

not knowing what else to do with a drunken sailor

that early in the morning but pink slip his childhood

like a wild rainbow salmon putting out to sea with a warning

not to raise the colours of its skull and crossbones

among the angel fleets of its breezy Sunday regattas?

PATRICK WHITE