THE TOWN DEAD BY MIDNIGHT

THE TOWN DEAD BY MIDNIGHT

The town dead by midnight, dark spring rain on the streets

like puddles of anthracite, the cat asleep in its feral innocence

and the furnace pipes cracking like arthritic bones

and there’s a bleakness that’s trying to speak for me

like a train whistle with a muse of its own. Words

are trying to understand me like a silence that sings

with a surrealistic accent in a stanza of migratory water birds

excluded from the aubades and aviaries of the dawn

because they don’t make cliches of the lakes they return to

to swim among the stars like constellations of themselves.

Sheltered from the adolescent temper of the wind

in the tolerable loneliness of my apartment, this bone-box

I write in the fair hand of a cursive script of smoke,

of rivers flooding their banks alluvially

with the emotional silts of a spring run off

that lavishes me on the roots of half-drowned trees,

I disembark like a lifeboat from a Viking funeral ship

and let my mind drift into the depths of an insignificant abyss

that’s never tasted the meaning in the flavour of death

or cared that much for the black humour of what I believe in

that labours at keeping me alive. If I knew why it should

I could only be a disappointment to the future

of my undiscovered solitude actualizing its creative potential

to enter into occult marriages with muses that sweep me off my feet

like stars and leaves off the stairwells of my deciduous arrivals.

I don’t petition the gods or summon the ghosts

of fires that burnt out yesterday like votive daylilies

in the aniconic shrines of the sun to return from the dead

and bless what I plead for as if I knew what to ask

from my sorrow that might help tomorrow rejoice

in what’s to come. Even wisdom doesn’t question

the nature of the song that emerges from the night

like a wild canary in a coal mine urgent as a pilot light

that smells apocalyptic gas in the subterranean labyrinths

of star-nosed moles blindly seeking to get at the roots of things

that only bloom in the dark underworlds of our radicalized starmud.

Bleak outside. Death, death, death in the dead air

of artless cement and chronic pageant of storefronts

like the repeating decimals of unappealing floats

in a municipal parade of all we’ve got to celebrate.

I don’t want to feel bleak inside, sickened by the world,

but Walmart is dyeing its fashion garments in the blood

of Bangladeshi girls skinned of their lives

by corporate traplines and parasitic politicians

baiting humans with 14 cents an hour seven days a week

like those wasps that lay their eggs like carnelian dots

on the foreheads of the living host to let their young devour it

like future consumers of the western world baptized

with brand names. Maybe I should meditate upon a flower

like the one Buddha gave Ananda with a knowing smile,

but all I see are white peonies freaked with the hemoglobin of children.

In my time, people with clean hands were usually the filthiest.

We were clever but we weren’t encouraged to be real.

We stuck to the unprincipled indifference of our social structures

like flypaper. We danced on the graves of our fellow humans

and promoted a trickle down theory of happiness like global warming.

Our weapons evolved like insects, but the abstract savagery

and rabid rage that deployed them were definitely

creationist, ante-diluvian, conservative, and simian. Nothing’s changed

since the first prehensile grip threw a bone ballistically

at the left front parietal lobe of another ape whose ideas

mythically deflated its brain. In back rooms

and sensorily deprived think tanks of lobbyists and spin-doctors

we made window dressing of democracy in the showcase windows

where we displayed the latest wardrobes like the death shrouds

of the humans our gluttony had culled. Misery polluted

the chandeliers of our crystal tears like a hemorrhagic fever of acid rain,

but we went on ghost dancing with ourselves as if things

would get better and better without realizing we were already dead.

Evil in the world. If you care, how can you not go mad?

If you don’t care, how can you not be peacefully complicit

in what it is by virtue of a sin of omission, forgetting

it will rush in like a backdraft of a fire through your door one day

because nature abhors a vacuum and paralysis and impotence

incite it like blood in the water, mice in a snakepit?

Atrocities perpetrated in the name of order are worse

than random accidents of chaos that hold nothing personal

against us being here without necessity or purpose

sussing out our feeble meanings for life like garden snails

bull-vaulting our own horns trying not to get gored on the moon

like a prehistoric aurex that went extinct before we did.

I should leave all these catastrophes behind me like

a graceful exit I made at the bend of an awkward entrance

and walk out into the darkness beyond this catwalk of streetlamps

posing like tungsten asphodels observing a moment of silence

with their heads bowed like cobras into the woods

down by the river but I’m loathe to track myself in like roadkill.

I want to walk ankle-deep in the starmud of the wolf paths

that will be thawing out this time of year before the rain

has had a chance to pack them down solid again or plump

the grass of the deerbeds. I just want to see one star

shining through the burgeoning branches in the burgundy crowns

of the birches putting their green gowns on again like renewable virgins.

Beauty coming out of the darkness like Spica in Virgo.

Trout lily, hepatica, wood sorrel, violet and crocus,

I want to see what colours the spring has on its palette this year.

I want to experience a pink full moon soon to be eclipsed in Scorpio

and expand the difference that makes to the way I understand things.

I want to know whose blood is coagulated on the candelabra

of the staghorn sumac leaning out over the river

like an old torch singer at a black mass beginning

to get her voice back as she feathers her reflection like a phoenix.

PATRICK WHITE