SITTING ON THE OUTDOOR PATIO AT O'REILLY'S

SITTING ON THE OUTDOOR PATIO AT O’REILLY’S

Sitting on the outdoor patio at O’Reilly’s

in a shady corner with the umbrella down

where they abide the smokers like lepers in an ashtray.

O, bad, bad. Say the purists whose way of life

is a diet. Pot of black coffee squatting like a guru

in the middle of the table, two beer for my buddy, Simon,

I’m anchored to my chair foursquare at the corner

of Gore and the Universe, watching the leaves

on the crab apple trees in the parking lot below

the heritage fire tower shed easily in the sunshine

like passing afterthoughts. Yellow eyelids.

Knowing there are not too many years left

I’ll be able to do this. Sit and watch. In the flesh.

The numbness and strain on the novellas

of the faces of a married couple shell-shocked

by the barrage of frontline circumstances

they’ve been under most of their adult lives

as if they had to bury their hearts just to survive

like something they’d come back to later,

Roadkill. A doe and buck. Ten points, no less.

The woman with a steel factory of thick, red hair

listening sexually to a career-oriented man

in a patchy beard he trims every Thursday

chat her up as she tries to recall the last burning bush

that left a rash on the inside of her thighs.

It’s good to see love still has its enthusiasts.

Almost nautical. The canal near. The heritage lamp.

I pull a pen out of the inside pocket of my leather jacket

that makes me look rougher than I actually am,

beautiful pen, peacock blue, with heft, like a sword,

or an oar I took for free when I last went

to pay part of my rent at the real estate office

across the street with the bricked-in windows

that look like the eyes of the blind. Impervious.

And I scribble on the brown envelope that scared me

at first, but only wanted to tell me how much

I would be getting on my old age pension

and guaranteed income supplement cheque

as if somehow I’d rounded all the bases

back to homeplate and now it was time to clean

my locker out and retire my number like a lottery ticket,

Normal’s even more surrealistic than spaced out is

because it’s not expected to be, my thought for the day.

Maybe that will become part of a poem later

as I wonder, looking out my apartment window,

how I ever ended up here, or why I’ve stayed

for the last thirty-three years other than cheap rent,

the company of trees, and long, long eras in which

to perfect my solitude like one of ten thousand lakes

around here that hasn’t been named yet

for some peculiarity of easy reference. Poet Lake.

Why not? I’ll be the first to drown my book in it.

Love lyrics to the fingerling water sylphs I’ll stock it with.

How many open doors of liberation have I had

to step through in the course of my life so far

to avoid being incarcerated by what I stepped into

like the new moon on the surface of the La Brea Tarpit

in the depths, or a soul into a body that was

confused by it like starmud and spiritual window putty?

How many tears have I beaded like a rosary of water

on oil, trying to make some sense of human sorrow,

compiling a zodiac of extinct species for a coffee-table

nobody ever opened? All my life I’ve stolen

poems from my poverty like a thief that gives back

tenfold. It’s a kind of poor boy pride I expect

but at least it’s mine and I’ll stand and I’ll fall by it,

moonrise and moonset, with no bitterness or regret,

few heralds at the entrance and no paid mourners at the exit.

Patinas of lustreless brass, old gold in the Bronze Age,

and scarlet letters like a sacred vowel of life

triple x-rated by the mythically-inflated hypocrites

at the auto de fe of the maples who’d rather

burn with desire in the house of life than

eat their own ashes out of the ethical gutter

of the hand of God washed in the blood of the lamb,

I watch the shadows of the leaves falling

against a wall of warm fieldstones giving

their heat up to the approaching night

like loaves of home-made bread cooling

on a windowsill it’s easy enough to mistake

for the threshold of a vagrant homelessness

I’ve laboured at like a road with no way back

to the security of the delusion I was going somewhere

when here, just as much as there, was where

it was at all along and will be, hallelujah, after I’m gone.

lol

PATRICK WHITE