BRUTAL, COLD NORMAL LIFE

BRUTAL, COLD NORMAL LIFE

Brutal, cold normal life with a few

familial affections to warm your heart at

as if you held your hands toward a fire.

The heart goes blue, the heart goes red,

two-thirds of a triune traffic light.

I’m not shedding, the way the autumn trees

are, there’s still hair on my head

though its the urn of somebody’s ashes

I never met. I try to treat it with respect

and there’s a smile on my face the colour

if my eyes I use for default when there’s a glitch

of good luck that makes a grey day blue.

I’ve forgiven my lovers and friends

their careless infidelities. The match

thrown from the car that started

a forest fire of sensitivities that didn’t

like to be criticized. I only know one

who keeps his word like an exotic bird

in his rib cage he’s teaching how to escape.

If I ask it’s precious, little enough

compared to what I’ve given, though

most of my gifts remain unopened,

I’ve dropped my pine-cones like time capsules

on a seabed of compass needles to soften the blow

when I root in the conflagration to come,

take hold, and show you what it is

to be Slavic and stand up to the wind.

I don’t ask for much so I’m never disappointed.

There are verities. And then there are

perennial truths. Sooner or later you get

sick of them, their relentlessness, almost tyranny

and after that there’s nothing but oblivion

to look forward to exploring, as if it

never mattered which boot you put on first,

or if your toothpaste tasted like a blessing or a curse.

And you don’t know if you’re eloquent Aaron

or recalcitrant Moses when he faced his snakey rod off

against pharaoh’s magicians. Big snake

eat the little snake and the little snakes go down

easy, like wet noodles, the wrong way.

It’s hard to know whether to resign yourself

to life, or celebrate like the clown who

believed there was something sacred

about his calling, making the mourners laugh

at their own funerals. Haven’t been that way

since Grade six when an award taught me

the Book of Changes begins with a logjam

of yarrow sticks, a sloppy job of clear-cutting

everything that goes on in an old growth forest.

I got as far as the Book of Total Knowledge,

volume L, and gave up cramming my drawers

with the old wind socks of flights I’ve never taken

because of the rain and poor visibility.

Pick a loose thread from the shoulder

of an oil spill and you’ve got a total eclipse

of everything you’ve ever tried to understand

blacked out like London in the blitz.

Lightning wars that freed the slaves like rain

when one or the other got its feelings hurt

by witching for water in hell. By now

the grail is a skull full of stardust that won’t

slake anybody’s thirst in this mirage of a desert.

I don’t blame anyone anymore for the things

they did or didn’t do. History’s an old menu

for blood and the peasants are always

caught off guard like the Newfoundland cod banks

when the Catholic church passed an infallible

papal edict that said everyone had to eat fish on Fridays.

Ichthus. Good Greek word. The sun is in

the vernal equinox. A hunter’s moon in Virgo.

Why not? Is quantum physics any less superstitious?

Everybody’s good guess must be tolerated

though the wilderness is more of a natural antidote

than a pharmaceutical fish farm. But wouldn’t it be

a bummer if they learned how to make

everything live forever thirty years from now?

Bad timing, as if we had anything to do with it.

I’ve grown nostalgic for the waterclocks

my youth knew before I started wandering by myself

by the Tay River late at night when I might be

somebody dangerous, when, in fact, I’m just alone

with my own thoughts and memories as if

it weren’t anybody’s business but my own,

though it’s not wise to freeze up in the highbeams

of an inquisitive squad car that thought it saw

a raccoon with a balaclava instead of a mask

on its head. The terrorists have infiltrated

our genetically modified, corn-fed gardens.

Darkness and anonymity are my close friends

though I’m sure they know who I am.

Solitude is my longest standing, undemanding mistress.

I can’t understand most of the follies of people

anymore than I can any longer distinguish

the gaudier feathers of the strutting peacocks

compared to the dowdiness of the hens

when it all comes down to whether you want

to enjoy sex with me tonight or not. I’m not

shocked by anything except a virgin at forty-one.

Or a nun who knows the Pierian spring is between her legs.

I walk like the old bull who’s been led

to the altar many times before strong enough

for the slaughter and the sacrifice, but bored

with the details of why it must be so.

Didn’t I look far enough into your eyes

to make course corrections on my starmaps

before you started shining like a moonrise?

Don’t tell me it wasn’t love at first sight

when you looked at me like a slumlord

and you saw the rent like a matador in a tauromachia

of the sun and the moon on the hoofs and horns

you draped in garlands of gored roses?

The scorpion jumped on the back of the frog

and the lesson was on him. Too bad a dragon

stopped to give you a ride you couldn’t poison.

Misplaced compassion isn’t always a mandate

for extermination. Or a good deed the onset

of a rebuke by the devil that feels like punishment,

or the truce of love, surrender to a creature

that can’t help being what it was meant to be,

but it’s circumspect to note the stinger at the end

of the question, when the sphinx looks forward

to the interrogation as if the future of the answer

lay ahead like the one voice for the three ages of man.

PATRICK WHITE