SITTING IN THE NIGHT AT MY DESK

SITTING IN THE NIGHT AT MY DESK

Sitting in the night at my desk, trying

not to intrude on my silence and solitude

I’m beginning to glow like a motherlode of gold

hidden deep in a heart of dark, dark ore

as the gas furnace cracks its pipes like the Tin Man

learning to play drums with brass knuckles on

and my cat chirps in her sleep beside me

and the goldfish are grazing on oxygen

at the surface of their becalmed tank,

three flames of a water ballet hanging

like the bent tines of a trident or the inverted candelabra

of some flower that blooms in fire as if

a quiet comet were passing through the room

uncertain whether it’s an arsonist in a library

or a funeral home, depending on the ghost you talk to.

Big night out there. No stars. Nothing moving.

The clouds are holding a pillow of snow

over the face of the town as it sleeps.

I can’t see anyone’s eyes and there’s

nothing I can say to the dreamcatchers in the windows

about the quality of the picture-music their listening to

that’s making them feel like spiderwebs other than

spring’s coming, the butterflies will be out soon

and we’ll all hang out like flypaper sticky with stars.

But in here where I’m witnessing my awareness of I am

as if I were swimming in a sea of nocturnal sapphires,

the first draft of a deciduous starmap caught

in the vertiginous eddies and whirlpools of the black holes

and supernovas exploding like fireflies and lighthouses

in distant island galaxies trying to warn me away from the rocks,

I go along with things like moonrise on a lake when there is one,

or mermaids singing like the Burgess Shale on the mountaintops

of lunar shadows creeping across their dead seabeds

like the long wavelengths of an outgoing tide.

The life of the mind isn’t mine though I’m

still delusional enough to think I’ve taken

possession of my heart. Let the wind blow

like the spiritual broom of an enlightened rehab center

and try to sweep my mirage away like stars

from the stairwells of a desert, let it huff and puff

as it will, no matter, it stays like a mirror that’s been kind to me.

It’s as important to have a fool in your life

that makes you laugh at yourself or at least break a smile

you can be loyal to, as it is to honour a wise man

with garlands and laurels and words he has no need of.

I’d rather be denuded by the fingertips and lips of love

than skinned by the manicured nails and scalpels of clarity.

Or let it make this scarred wolf-hide into a drumhead if it must

but once the duststorm in the hourglass has passed

and time has come to the end of its traplines like a good thing

that couldn’t last, I’ll still be standing here as I am tonight

in my tattoos and starmaps with the tears I painted

in my own blood under their eyes like ripe plums

about to thunder like a pulse in the ears of the abyss.

The banshee of the train whistle goes looking for her lost child

like an orphan she abandoned in the woods. Even

under the duff and detritus of last year’s works

the wet night bleeds of light by putting leeches on their eyelids

to draw the four humours of their infectious visions out,

I can feel the wild-eyed crocuses blooming

like the cervixes of spring unashamed of their sex.

I can feel the heat of the sun like a bemused caress

on the grey cedar driftwood of my arm as if

all these puppets in chaos beside the lake

were made of flesh and bone as small snapping turtles

lay their shields against the gunwales of a half-sunken log

in the warrior hall of a Viking funeral ship on fire

at Lance aux Meadows in Newfoundland

watching the ice bergs drift by like lazy, white whales

in search of the Titanic and the Pequot caught

with their lifeboats down like the typical hubris

of an anachronistic biblical death wish

to drown like Narcissus in their own ship-wrecked reflections,

like critical questions left unanswered

by the Attic dialect of a chorus of satyrs

celebrating life at a sacrifice of tragic scapegoats.

Imagine that as if you were one of the voodoo dolls,

strawdogs, or a scarecrow of smouldering hay

that smells like methane in the sun as the snow

rots around you like an archipelago of lunar leper colonies

trying to imperialize the moon as they lose

sight of the last of their shorelines to global warming,

I say to myself in compassionate tones of Wilfred Owen,

the poetry’s in the pity, not the wherefore of the atrocity.

Mine moves in like the shapeshifting wraiths of a cool fog

into a no man’s land of dead trees sticking out of the lake

like crucifixes and stakes where my ghosts

can breathe freely like comets at their own wakes

in a detoxified upper atmosphere of northern lights

whose veils are neither a seance nor a summons

to a mystic exorcism in the green sunsets of ochre mustard gas.

I lay a wreath of cedar boughs down on the lake

like a poultice of moonlight to remember them by

and cool their eyes kissing each of them to sleep

to keep them from feeling like bats smoked out of an attic

where we keep the dismembered toys of our childhood memories

we’re not in the habit of playing with anymore

as if we grew bored with trying to destroy them.

A shudder of cobalt blue in the sky, and here comes

the sun like a burning bush of vagrant tumbleweed

in the ghost town of a deserted zodiac, thinking

it can tell me what to do again like a prophetic errand boy

with messages for a pharaonic reality of lesser magicians

trying to drive the golden chariot of the sun

like corporate executives and spin doctors of Amun Ra

through the gunshot slums of a great wound in the side

of the Red Sea in the morning that’s about to overwhelm them

in sunamis of fanatical holy blood on the wings of a burning dove

consumed by self-immolations of savagely righteous indignation

that the night should end in exile, and the day

that’s journeyed so far from what it used to know

wake up alone and homeless as a love lyric in ashes to this.

PATRICK WHITE