CAP MY PAINTS. WALK AWAY FROM THE PAINTING

CAP MY PAINTS. WALK AWAY FROM THE PAINTING

Cap my paints. Walk away from the painting.

Came to a fork in the shadows of an old oak.

Let it finish itself. My lungs and legs ache.

Go sit down at the desk. My chair creaks

as if it were always perturbed by something in its sleep.

Listen to the night sounds of the town on a Saturday night

watering down the drunks who by now

have either found sleep, true love, or a fight.

The carpenter rock stars trying to play rock and roll

like loggers are done for the night at the Shark and Bull

above the 1950’s carwash with horse stalls for your car

and hoses hissing like rat snakes on wet cement.

The old banshee of the train whistle howls at my window

for bones the bush wolves dug up years ago.

You ever publish anything blue-white and brilliant

like a first magnitude star that just showed up one night

and did all the shining for you, then watch it grow yellow

like the dusk of a middle-aged book, or the sun?

Jupiter Venus and Mercury in a menage a trois in the west.

Too cloudy for any serious voyeurism this side of the windows.

My telescope stands in the kitchen like an anti-aircraft gun

staring at the titles of over read books I’m going to

selectively dump like ballast soon to gain some altitude

of my own and travel light at the behest of the wind

that’s bullying the leaves on the municipal trees like green recruits.

A turmoil of starmud settling in the puddles, wary sounds

of threatened animals coming out of their hiding places

like feral cats and half-mad strangers that live

in worlds of their own that have yet to be discovered

like life on another planet, and the two or three

weeping adolescent girls followed by concerned friends

up the street, as their tears turn into acid rain

they splash in their own faces, burning to get even

with their heartbreak like jellyfish of white phosphorus.

The whole magnum opus of novelistic humanity in a week.

I speculate but I don’t judge. I perceive but I leave

many of my most acute insights to be blunted by the silence

like a sword I’m returning to the water sylphs

drowning in the sacred pools of their sorrows,

a scorched earth policy no one can use after me

as I progress backwards through similar strategic defeats

I suffered earlier in life. It takes a lot of wounding

and soothing to ripen a green apple bitter as spring.

The little acorns from which mighty oak trees grow

live on a diet of wild pigs from the feed store

and somehow, against the odds of cliched expectations,

between seven come eleven and snake eyes,

love still seems to work out when you leave the heart

to tusk it out alone like the first and last crescents of the moon.

There’s a renovated shoe factory in town that now attends

ballet classes and lift weights in its afterlife and one

that manufactures soap that’s always on the nightshift

that smells like Bouncing Bet, Lady at the Gate,

the Pride of London in a pioneer garden that doesn’t make

as many suds when you hold its sap under the tap

amazed at the fragrance of bubbles in the multiverse.

Peace by acclamation, I’m dispossessed of myself

in the ambient silence that befalls me in the dark

just before dawn when the ghosts begin to drift back

like smoke from the last votive candle of the night

to their vandalized graves in the heritage cemetery.

These days I depend more upon my eyes than the light

to realign my shadows with the insights that are casting them

like the morphic forms of dream figures in a shapeshifting world

across the return journey of a landscape my mindstream runs through.

PATRICK WHITE