COUNTING THE BRICKS IN THE WALL ACROSS THE STREET

COUNTING THE BRICKS IN THE WALL ACROSS THE STREET

Counting the bricks in the wall across the street.

Full sunlight. Noon. Blue sky. Bikers

revving their throttles like angry sheets

snapping in the wind on a clothesline

as if they had their hands on the throats

of their ex-girlfriends. No gender bias intended.

I can’t hear the pigeons cooing under the eaves

over the snarl of old men on fourstrokes.

I’m just sitting here like the flagging waterlily

of a collapsed parachute that doesn’t want

to jump up anymore like a dandelion seed

at the least gust of wind. For the moment, at least,

no more descending toward paradise

like a counter-intuitive guess at which way is up.

I’m tied like a hooded hawk to the arm of a swamp.

Icarus is not all that unhappy with where

he crash-landed in a farmer’s field. Could

have been a kite in a powerline, a bat

velcroed to the burdock in a porchlight

that messed up its flyby. Here is there everywhere

if you’ve got enough imagination to lose yourself

in the extraordinary ordinariness of things

close to your heart. The eery patina of time

is always as young as once and once only

and like eternity, gone in the flash of an eye,

casting its shadow of now or never over everything

with the urgency of a fire hydrant

that thinks of itself as a heart transplant.

Lightyears left to go in my winged heels

without a flightplan to deliver the messenger,

but it isn’t the journey, today, it’s my shoes, my shoes

that are wearing me out where the rubber

hits the road like a poem late at night on

a hot asphalt highway reeking of dead frogs

like popcorn in the cinematic highbeams of a joy ride.

My feet sore as if I’d been firewalking on asteroids

down some long dirt road that would sweep

a biker right off his wheels if he cornered too sharply.

An intensely temperate day. The great sea

of awareness is not displeased with its own weather,

though I can hear the rootfires of dragons

growing underground like the cosmic eggs

of island galaxies about to hatch out

from the crude ore that’s being refined

like the psychodynamics of a sacred volcano

in my subconscious, I’m more curious than perturbed.

I’m going to stretch out here in the grass

at the side of this road. Let the ants worry

about how to get me back to the colony piecemeal.

Only the dog on a short foodchain wants to get away.

I’m going to dump this heavy load I’ve amassed

like a god-particle backpacking along the trail

like an alloy of a red wolf and a coyote weary

of keeping the shepherd moons around here on their toes

without meaning to in the struggle to survive.

I’m not even going to bother to lick my wounds

like a herbalist among the wild roses and the words

that sting like the antiseptics in my mouth

and the thorns I usually staple them up with

without leaving too much of a scar on the moon.

Physician heal thyself. Either way, let the roses bloom

or bleed out like red skies in the morning

that burn like iodine, or put lipstick on the clouds

at twilight to the delight of lovesick sailors.

Just want to lie here like the figure head of a fallen tree

or a shipwreck in port with a cargo of failures for awhile.

What I must be only a fool would try to do

anything about. The rain falls and the housewells

are full. I raise my crystal skull to the stars

like hidden secrets veiled by the light and I drink it

down to the lees of an emptiness that tastes

like the cast off afterbirth of wine on my tongue.

PATRICK WHITE