SERIOUS AS A BELL, DEEP AS A HOUSEWELL, I WAS YOUNG

SERIOUS AS A BELL, DEEP AS A HOUSEWELL, I WAS YOUNG

Serious as a bell, deep as a housewell, I was young,

too big for my skull, tight as a nut in my shell

with the sweetmeat of the moon, immense

among the stars, intense, angry, almost scary,

seething with ambitions I took for granted,

like discipline and talent, love I’d be fulfilled by one day.

Blue fire didn’t shoot out of my eyes like a sky dragon,

but I was born in a low place and I liked to put wings

on the snakes I could relate to, scorned as they and I were,

I answered my detractors with brilliant oxymorons

that baffled them into thinking I was mad. Nine in the fifth place.

Of course, I was. Gone, gone, gone, altogether

gone beyond the history of scars that was my childhood,

though I was too experienced at the time to remember

what innocence was and how it doesn’t always

make you vulnerable when you’re nine in a garbage can

where they throw people like body parts and rank orchids

that didn’t get invited to the dance because

they never learned to step on anyone else’s toes

but their own and those immediately closest to them,

crushed hearts like strawberries someone heeled into the dirt,

cigarette butts, left to rot among the black rosaries of the ants

from the enterprising world that carried them away

piecemeal as if they cared, and that was the best

they could hope for. Baby never got a new pair of shoes

and the second hand ones never quite fit

like a yoke of oxen coupled to your feet as they grew

into the tumuli of bunions like moonrises on your toes.

You wanted to learn to walk, you had to get up on your own.

You wanted to learn to see you had to know

what you had to close your eyes to. I could read

books and faces, and which of the housewives

with rollers in their hair, hanging up the laundry

with clothes-pegs in their teeth, hands raw with bleach

and four kids in the yard like manic laughing gas and blasting caps

would be washing her face in the bitter tears of her hands

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow that never came

like a husband home from the pulp mill who wasn’t drunk

with a paycheque in his hand that wasn’t clenched in a fist

for having to return to her, the kids, the dismal job

that underrated him two rungs under the burning ladder

he tried to climb out of the cesspool on like a spider

fighting for its life in the death trap of a toilet bowl

he flushed like the last word he had to say about himself.

I could read the stars. I could read danger leaning

in a doorway like a social worker, a Sunday school teacher,

a truant officer for delinquent offenders, an ex-con

out on a weekend pass who thought my mother

had been waiting for him all her life in isolation.

Egypt and Mesopotamia amazed me with the mystery

of all those lives I could wonder my way into

like the mirages of time, planets I’d never live

to walk on to see how different and strange

everything could be beyond the windows

of my boarded-up bedroom to keep the ghouls

and the pervs and the thieves out. Shadows

on the other side of the curtains that made me lie

very, very still under the covers hoping they

didn’t hear me breathing so I wouldn’t be called upon

to be more afraid of being afraid again than I was brave.

PATRICK WHITE