FREEZING RAIN

FREEZING RAIN

Freezing rain. An incrementally ordinary day

being cruel to spring like a bad mood

that doesn’t understand a teen-ager’s energy.

Everyone’s retro-Blackhawks soaked with slush.

Buds on the trees, but the blossoms have taken

two steps back. Things as they are. Your mind

as it is. Pigeons in the ashes of grey miracles.

Yesterday’s mystery today’s history of erosion.

A thousand years from now, will somebody

try to imagine the way it was now as I have so often

Shakespeare closing the door behind him

at the Montjoie’s on the corner of Fleet Street

and Monkwell, thinking he might check out the bookstalls

at St. Paul’s on his way to monitor the receipts of the theatre?

Pride of London, Lady at the Gate, Bouncing Bet,

did dandelions grow between the cobblestones?

Though all the world’s a stage, and we are such stuff,

as he says, dreams are made on, were there days when the Globe

was a pebble in his shoe that vexed his winged heels?

As many uneventful moments in an eventful life

as there are blades of grass to outnumber

the new recruits of the trees trying to take a stand

in the water-logged fields at the edge of town.

Old ladies breaking their hips when they slip

and the school bus is grounded. House-bound

on a farm out of reach of going anywhere a glacier wouldn’t

with four ansy kids and the internet down

until the power’s restored, is of no less moment

in the history of the world than Shakespeare’s lost years

as a clandestine tutor fond of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The ordinary takes on the patina of the extraordinary

in the middens of time. We’re intrigued like mirrors

by the reflections of who we were any day on earth,

once we disappear, strangers to ourselves, as if Shakespeare

never had to bend down to tie a shoelace, empty his boot,

or drool when he dreamt. Days like today

with their utter lack of diffidence to what was being written

in 1603 by a jobbing poet with cosmic sensibilities.

Who knows who’ll will be in the minds of those to come?

Maybe some die with an idea of who they were,

putting a little too much emphasis on a good guess,

but the memory of anyone’s always a work in progress.

There’s always the afterbirth of life after theatre

laughing and chattering after the silence of the last act

leaving a funeral imposed upon their affections

like tears of freezing rain, the shadow of terror marring their pity.

Telomerase of frayed chromosomes, I’m writing poems

on flypaper helically wheeling among the stars

trying to make constellations out of houseflies,

and I’m seeking a deeper intimacy between words and my mind

as if all these labyrinths I keep losing myself in

were no more off road from the path that keeps taking me

through life, than my fingerprints are from my skin.

Devoted to failing at achieving the unattainable

as if it could be actualized as an event of little significance,

I collaborate like a sacred clown in the lonely absurdity

of my creative freedom to let things make me up

as they flow along like the waterclock of a narrative theme

as the curtain goes up like a veil of freezing rain

to reveal the screening myth of a character modelled

on my eyes, my heart, my feeling for the part I’m playing

like a bucket the bottom’s fallen out of like a deus ex machina

through a trap door ill-timed to make an exit like Keats

with a awkward bow, having written my name

like a tourist in water to see what it feels like to drown

in your own lungs like a bubble of blood rising

to the moment it disappears as if nothing had happened at all.

Dreams aren’t solid, but even unfulfilled, they’re real.

PATRICK WHITE