EVEN THOUGH IT'S ONLY THE CANADA GEESE

EVEN THOUGH IT’S ONLY THE CANADA GEESE

Even though it’s only the Canada geese

moving like prayer beads and caravans

out of a white Sahara of snow to come,

it’s still a child’ first night in hospital alone,

abandoned, it’s still the electric dagger

of separation in the hand of an assassin

you raised as one of your own. Native

absentia around a wounded firepit

that died like a besieged town from within.

The last waterbird flying out of the cauldron

of Stalingrad as the sixth army looks upon

the futility of its glory disappearing into

the distance as it’s about to be boiled

like a kid in its mother’s milk. Seig Heil

like an hour hand at midnight at the stroke

of doom. Goose-step your way into

the cooking pot. The wasps in the apple-orchard

grow nasty and then they’re numb

as frozen semi-colons on the windowsill

or as the Arabs say, the first to get angry

loses. When the last lifeboat’s left, drown

in your own isolation like a beach in paradise

or learn to swim through fire out of your depths

like hot diamonds on ice, or a meteor

with life inside making a quiet impact

in Antarctica like the stem cell of another

roll of the dice we carved from the skull

of the moon as if we were poaching mammoth tusks

like the first and last crescents of an extinct species.

Insulated by hibernal modernity from the elements.

Distracted by the labyrinths of loneliness

we wander in, convinced we’re getting somewhere

that’s always better than here, but when

you hear the geese high overhead at night

as you have a thousand times before you can’t help

but hear something sad, wise, intractable

in the calling of a wounded voice ancient

with farewells. It’s a funeral march. It’s a requiem.

It’s a dying trumpeter swan in the sunset

addressing the dead it too will soon forget.

This autumn I listen to the fireball whiskey

raging like old drunks sitting like flying buttresses

at the bar, exaggerate the fire-power

in the hearts of last year’s campaign

consigned to the pages of history now

like leaves to the duff and detritus

of the archival forest floor acidic

with slippery calendars caked together

like leeches bleeding the autumn to break

the fever like war with a scalpel big as a bayonet

and a doctor’s certificate to be absent without leave

like the shedding trees when it’s harvest time

in East Anglia and Harold’s medieval army

has to leave at precisely the wrong moment

to bring in the sheaves and split the heartwood

with a diamond cutter’s eye for how

it cleaves so much easier when the blood freezes.

Undone in the midst of chaos. The maples

are throwing their colours down on the ground

like a half mast that took it too far down

when it came time to surrender and begin

to befriend the beauty of autumn in the ruins.

Pillowed in goosedown snow in an empty nest

isn’t going to insulate us from what we dream,

though we hope for a good night’s rest,

when it’s colder than blood on the snow outside

and the wind in blue wode empowered

by a moon that asks no quarter and gives none,

doesn’t hit the window like the soft thump

of a sparrow or a snowball but shrieks like a demonic she-wolf

baring its snarling icicles like the fangs of chandeliers

barn dancing with scarecrows and strawdogs

in an ice storm making a frontal assault

on hospitalized emergencies behind a gated parking lot.

Stragglers of the wild grapevines flambeed

like brandy you don’t need a gasmask to breath

the bouquet of as it vaporously sublimates

like a good year for metaphors that cut to the quick

like the ghosts of past autumns cradled in your hand.

Like the bubble of a crystal snifter warming up to you

like a skull it gets easier to believe as the night wears on

as if the last ice age were a distant relative

you discovered you had in common too late

to make everything you carefully prophecied come true.

Canada. The meeting place of frozen rivers

and flying saucers come to pick up the survivors

of 1111 stamping out encoded s. o. s.s on

the shrinking ice-floes of dispossessed polar bears.

My mother used to tell me when she was

an Australian artist in the American Red Cross

as red-bellied zeroes were flying over Brisbane

dropping pamphlets like gum tree leaves when

it’s spring in the northern hemisphere

to terrorize the indigenous citizens with nightmares

too implausibly conceivable to be believed,

everyone agree the next war would be fought

in Canada like the arising of the great black snake

in Blake’s cold-blooded, prophetic poem, America.

I’ve wondered superstitiously about that since

I first heard it. Who dislikes a peacekeeper

selling treaties to the natives like real estate

with reservations on the moon like Grey Owl

pretending he wasn’t English enough to be eaten

by the queen or a culture molesting Catholic school

beatifically blaspheming a mother tongue

that wasn’t allowed to speak up for her children

when they cried out in their sleep like the Ojibway

word for pain when a snowman puts its hand

over their mouths to smother the fire in smoke

like Zyklon B as if they were smudging a peacepipe

with sweetgrass for tourists who want to get back

to the inhuman nature of the way things used to be?

Remember when the beaver were skinned

to sit on the heads of Europe like stovepipes

and lampshades that slapped their tails

at the first sign of a wolf nosing around

their lodge poles with an heraldic device?

Brebeuf burned at the stake by the heretically innocent

who refused to be demonized imperiously

by a civilized bestiary of xenophobic totems?

PATRICK WHITE