DREAMING STRANGE

DREAMING STRANGE

Dreaming strange on a mattress of snakes

slowing down in the early autumn

like the hour hands of cold-blooded clocks.

They’re winching yachts out of the water

like sharks at Rideau Ferry Dock.

“Winter is icummen in, icummen in”

as life braces to take a bath in its own grave,

but nothing, I mean nothing matters

very much right now to the crickets and frogs

mesmerized by Indian summer into

an encore of white noise in the unleafing woods

and the whole town doped out on opioids

like a clean needle exchange for sunbeams.

No one’s wearing their flying carpet out

under the window quite yet, though it’s hard

not to be reminded of what’s icummen in

when the blueberries have the same look

in their eyes as roadkill and just because

time stops to admire its own reflection

doesn’t mean it’s forgiven us for wasting it

on the trivial pursuits of our own survival.

The moment shapeshifts and I change with it

not knowing whether it’s dusk or dawn,

if it’s time to go to ground or pull up stakes

like the heretical scarlet runners and sunflowers

that flamed out like pilot lights with big dreams

of setting the world on fire with seeds and beans.

How odd that passions I was ready

to commit suicide or die for yesterday

have faded like the watercolours of the falling leaves

or old, grey barnboards, warped by the sun

and the rain, pulling the nails out

of their stigmatized crossbeams with their teeth

and spitting them on the ground like pine-needles

or Androcles and the lion. A cedar rail fence

on the south side of an unrocked field

with nothing to keep in or out anymore

since the last cow was trucked off to auction.

The Indian paintbrushes are matchbooks in ashes.

The rosaries of the Canada geese leaving

at midnight like tenants sneaking out on the rent

are birds on the jinx of a prayerwheel

heading home like white-collared Jesuits to France

leaving the pagans to their own resources,

dancing around the firepits of the spirits

they return to like default salvations

that will get them through the winter

like ten cubic cords of hardwood and a moose

in the freezer like a baby mammoth in an ice-age.

I’m trying to grow old elegantly like a sunset

the fighter pilots at Trenton would want to spray bomb

with contrails, or a troubled soul might want

to disappear into like the denouement

of a long road around the knots in its heartwood

obstructing the flow of the grain from finding

the dynamic equilibrium of its own level at rest,

be it among the dark roots of things, or leaves

burning on the water of the lake as the stars emerge.

Not for fame or to embroider the descending drapery

of the dream to fool the last act of the play

into thinking it’s forever spring. Not for the laurels

I’m just as happy to have fall from the brick walls

they cling to like ivy after the burning of the books.

Not believing the night is a reward I’m entitled to

for anything I deserve or have earned,

or might haven fallen to earth like a windfall

of wild apple trees with no effort on my part,

but simply to honour the anonymous starmud

that rooted Venus in my eyes like the fire of love

on the green bough of the morning, and in the evening,

approaching me now, like a doorway that’s

opening before me, just as incomprehensively beautiful

through the dead branches still blossoming and bearing

behind the abandoned farmhouse the ghosts

of the previous tenants beside the Jerusalem artichokes left

like the sign of an afterlife that would go on thriving without them.

PATRICK WHITE