NOT LONGING FOR, NOT MISSING ANYONE, NOT WISHING FOR MUCH

NOT LONGING FOR, NOT MISSING ANYONE, NOT WISHING FOR MUCH

Not longing for, not missing anyone, not wishing for much,

maybe the last half of the rent, my muse stepping

out of a thicket of hawthorn, a white-tailed doe,

into a clearing in my mind that doesn’t care

if she licks the salt block or not. The town gearing up

for Friday night, the roaring flatulence of bad mufflers

throttles up like distant echoes of the bad boy dragons

in the urns of ageing bikers, each of their women

astraddle a horse of her own like a black leather saddle bag

studded like a starmap of the pyramids on the plain of Giza

as they gauge the number of points on the handlebars

of each other’s chrome plated antlers underneath my window.

Buck with you, anytime, bud, but loud isn’t going

to outshout the whisper of the past that lives

like a ghost in your ear. Man up to the fact

your heart’s done a lot of hard time in solitude

and if you haven’t gone mad, you’re a little more

thoughtful and kinder than you ever expected to be

discretely intrigued by the second innocence of the novelty.

O, the racket of the screening myths of decultified fish

still removing the baffles from their gills, so

their four-strokes can sound like it’s their engines

not them, having the heart attack. Idle, down, brother,

idle down. There’s only so much time and then

there’s eternity. Let the moment seize itself

for a change. What do you think? The dark energy

accelerating galaxies over the event horizons of your precipitous eyes

into an abyss that’s been stripped of its patches like stars

among rival houses of the zodiac, are trying to take

advantage of the opportunity? If so, toward what end?

Better to have never been born isn’t bad or best.

No need to be wounded spiritually in a holy war

between the Pollyanna and the pessimist in you.

Be a good Roman and make room for both

in that pantheon of tribal superstitions you brought

home with you like skeletons in your closet,

and remember to take Sophocles, cum grano salis,

in jest more often like the black farce of himself

that made him one of the tragic clowns of comic Athens.

Sniper or snowball, this is your life alone

and you get one shot at it with unlimited ricochets

but you’ve got to get a lead on it like the light of a star

if you want to hit a moving target on the fly

you’ve spooked out of the bush like the moon

as if there were no comprehensive alibis for anything.

Time, death, the devil, and suffering aren’t

the mercenary allies of a local apocalypse,

anymore than the moon is a golden chariot

on a milk wagon run on the spiral arm of a galaxy

delivering bittersweets with a free razorblade

and Vas Hermeticum to the alchemists

in the bloodbank of a Pleistocene slum

going through glacial withdrawals at the end

of an ice age. Haven’t you noticed yet how all

your threats have turned into sententious adages

on the backs of frictionless matchboxes

as if you finally put some clean oil

in that short shag flying carpet of yours.

Instead of kicking in doors, try valves for awhile.

Why labour to bite a snake back in the throat

like a wavelength you weren’t wary enough

not to step on in the first place? And however

you caress them love won’t make snakes purr

like a highway you can train to bite other people.

Hate’s a limp arrow. As if somebody fletched

a spaghetti noodle and then boiled it

like an old guitar string on a compound bow

glued like a splint of bone to your broken heartwood

trying to let it all hang out and what don’t hang

pull like the ripcord on a candling emergency chute.

But if I say it’s all the same to me this morning,

please don’t mistake that for the hidden grail

of a dead metaphor buried like the skull of a cure

to the black plague that ratted out the Middle Ages.

No ship to jump from. No port to quarantine

with silence. No one setting themselves afire

in a danse macabre of self-flagellating scarecrows

crucified like martyrs by their own slave revolt.

I’m listening to the rush of the wind in the crowns

of silver Russian olives like the wings of a white horse

grazing in the starfields of a slow, easy moonrise

in this labyrinth of roads that have made a calling of my life

disappearing like the keening of a waterbird

into the evanescent distances of getting lost

in my own eyes as if the ride, stars in the nightsky,

never comes to a dead end where your tattoos wash out.

PATRICK WHITE