GIVEN WE HAVE MORE FAULTS IN COMMON THAN VIRTUES

GIVEN WE HAVE MORE FAULTS IN COMMON THAN VIRTUES

Given we have more faults in common than virtues,

and these our lives, crude approximations

of our calamitous purposes, the dire aspirations

of deceiving our indifference toward one another

as a sublime mode of spiritual innocence, isn’t it time,

grey Sunday in a small Ontario town, to admit

we’re a fellowship of buffoons and dunces, sacred clowns

with prophetic second-guesses that muddle our starmud

in oceanic puddles of awareness that dirty the mirages

in the mirrors that lie to us to make things perfectly clear

everything we reflect upon is an expedient fiction

of a narrative theme like a wavelength of snake

in the stargrass of a space-time continuum with our name on it?

And it’s not the mirrors that are distorted, but the orbits

we place them in like pathways through life

that keeping going around and around like the eternal recurrence

of a snake with its tail in its mouth, bearing in mind

infinity’s just a zero with a twist. Like a bow tie or hand cuffs,

a twin noose for murder suicides in a heart-breaking,

neck-snapping, wretched act of love for people who’ve had enough.

We’re all looking at each other with stones in our hands

like broken windows. I think we keep trying to prove we’re bright

as a consolation or screening myth for not really

liking ourselves all that much. Ever ask what the earth

feels about you? Ever find an abacus that can count

the skulls of full moons that never came to harvest

because we swung our scythes and scimitars at them

while the grain was still green enough to thresh

like the Fertile Crescent with a blood lust for vengeance?

Ever take a long, hard, seriously experienced look

at what you’ve done to your innocence like a book

you tore the pages out of in disgust, and ate like a herbivore

with blood on its fur? If we keep setting traplines

where we have to walk, we’ll end up chewing our own legs off.

It’s the best of persistent, Blakean, follies to realize

with a full heart, you’ll never know the ineffable

unnamed seeker that comes looking for you

like an empty lifeboat out of the maritime fog

of your nebularity like the world out of every moment

of the void there’s a shepherd moon born to keep an eye

on a flock of tigers in sheep’s clothing. But here we are

lost in all the right directions, despairing

of ever making a course change in our lives

as if we’d forgotten we encompass the stars

in our flesh and blood, and it’s those who wander

in the wilderness that make the maps with the cherub-cheeked

wind blowing from all quarters at once as if

they were trying to start a fire of lichens and sorghum

under the pyre of a sky burial on a blustery day.

Did someone pull our spinal cord like a wick

or a rip cord out of the nape of our necks

so we all ended up candling like parachutes

falling like dandelions and daylilies to our deaths?

Isn’t it time we started falling toward paradise again

as if it didn’t matter what direction we were firewalking in,

windfalls of us, an army of gardeners springing up

from the dragon’s teeth we sowed in the farrows

of the starfields we ploughed with the moon

like the immaculate conception of oceans in the rose

without seeds? And if you think you understand that

like the preconception of a sleepwalking dawn

talking in a dream you woke up from a few nights ago,

you’re a bigger fool than I am who wrote it.

But let’s sit down, for once, on the ground,

while the church bells are banging their foreheads

against their doorsills, and have a good laugh

at the sublime fun meaning can have with your life

like a child appealing to the playfulness of a serious-minded clown.

Let’s all confess we’re losers all at the same time

so nobody gets left out of the victory parade

we can have in our honour, throwing free candy

to the kids, honk, honk, as if the absurdity of our celebrations

were enough of a meteoric foundation stone

to build a palace of the waters of life upon.

You feel like a misplaced crustacean in a swamp,

let’s look for the barges of the waterlilies

as if we were lighthouses on nightwatches way out at sea

sworn to silence and secrecy like space hiding out in the open.

Let’s pretend its Christmas at the Battle of the Bulge

and everyone, enemy and friend alike is singing Christmas carols drunk

in the eye of a storm that can’t stop crying

for the whole lot of us, as we gather our dead like cordwood.

Let’s grow sick of our viciousness and expurgate

like a cat on a couch as if we were forthright and honest

about what we’ve had to swallow to survive ourselves.

Look up. We’re moving into a big space now,

at twenty kilometres a second toward Vega in Lyra,

that will overwhelm us with how unprepared we are

to accommodate ourselves like guests in our own house of life.

Will somebody please sweep the zodiacs of the tracks

we left on the path to nowhere that ever pleased us

off with a cedar bough so no one’s in danger

of following anyone’s path but their own into that vastness

arrayed before us like a happy, healthy, habitable planet

willing to take the long shot with a little English on the cue-ball

as I’m trying to do here by blundering through the dark

like a moth into a lamp on the porch of enlightenment

along with the flies, the mosquitoes, bats, gnats and spiders

whose nets are tearing under the weight of their overfishing.

Let’s delegate a hive of our best astronauts

like artistic fireflies to overpaint the writing on the wall

as if we got the message a long time ago

and now’s the moment the foghorns, bells,

security alarms, the worn signage of the turf war liens

we hold against our own dispossession, the lizard eyes

of the cameras that follow us around like sunflowers

that suspect we’re not rising from our own deathbeds

every morning to face the gloom of the shadows

that are cast upon us like first stones at glass houses

full of night like the siloes of starwheat that resemble

observatories clinging like solitary barnacles

to the world mountains on the backs of sea-going turtles,

take a moment of silence in like a deep breath of light

and realize how effortlessly impossible life might seem

in the way things always work out for the underdogs,

you’ve got to stand like a maple in the unbroken winner’s circles

of the rain in the tree rings in your heartwood

on the threshold of a photo finish line you nosed over

as if everyone you’ll ever meet had a hearse and a horse in the race

that would come in on time, and Pegasus wasn’t a lapwing

taking a swan dive in the first round of an uncontested beginning.

PATRICK WHITE