I SEE MY CHILDHOOD IN A BROKEN MIRROR

I SEE MY CHILDHOOD IN A BROKEN MIRROR

I see my childhood in a broken mirror.

Seven again. Yet not quite the same.

A baleful dream figure, a wraith of then,

a boy supercharged with apprehensive energy,

hovering pensively like a curtain in the broken air,

torn like a veil from the face in the broken window,

sometimes standing on the dank earth

that was always in shadow, but lightly, as if

the whole broken world had been saturated

in sorrow, and Patti Page was on the radio.

Evanescent, auroral, almost immaterial,

a lingering vapour of what he was then,

I retain some sense of what he was feeling,

but he has no idea that I exist as a furtherance

of those emotions, sophisticated and complex

as a quantumly entangled creation myth

shared in common can become. As

the apple is to the blossom that disappeared

to let things proceed as they must to fruition.

Sad, thoughtful, angry boy, smouldering

like a wet cedar bough to stay lost in the fog

of his innocence, or smudge his awareness

of the raw rash of a raging drunk that scratched

at his heart like a father until it bled to death

like a medicine bag that longed to be a cure-all,

you did didn’t you, but your magic was too small.

And your mother was the martyred lioness

who stood between her cubs and the ravenous man

who would have eaten you all, just to say he had.

And you, the eldest, when did you start to shoulder

that bell of conscience that somehow accused you,

by complicity, even as an onlooker, to the black farce

of tragic severance madly slashing the life

in front of you like the fleshy cheeks of a rubber doll,

with mechanical eyes that opened and closed

like a guillotine in a reign of terror that convinced you

somehow you must be bad, given you were

the lowest common denominator between two extremes

going at each other like opposite ends of a burning bridge?

How many younger selves have I fathered over a lifetime

to make up for the absence of one of my own.

Little arsonist, out of my ashes, I tell you

it wasn’t you who set fire to the world

that’s been burning down around you for lightyears.

I’m not going to climb the mountain and sacrifice you

to anyone, I’m not going to come to you

like a stranger to play father for a day

and assume you like baseball without asking

because I’m trying to float my way into heaven

at one minute to midnight like a bubble of apple piety

that refused to admit there were any thorns in life,

that everything was whole and mended, as if

there were no boxing events off limits you could

take a kid to he would have liked a whole, lot better

than a sport you were trying to indoctrinate him into like a cult.

I’m not trying to throw a right hook with a catcher’s mitt on.

You just stand there, as you are, little hero,

with that enlarged philosophical, poetic heart of yours

way too old for your years, as if you were trying

Keats on for size, wounded like an initiate

into the discipline of that fist clenched at your side.

Let me rest my hand on your shoulder a moment

like the stoic affection of one man to another

and by that let you know how much I admire and respect you

for those wild, childhood virtues of survival

you planted in me like seeds of wilful compassion

that grew like morning glory in a rose arbour with thorns.

I want to always remember you like that.

A small warrior. A dragon slayer. With a bell

on your head like a visor you tilted at a world

of windmills sword dancing with themselves

like the hands of a clock at a victory parade of its own shadows.

O inseparable, when the geese are overhead

scattering the ashes of the dead in a long rosary

of lament, I’ll take you with me when I go.

PATRICK WHITE