IT'S GREYING OVER, BUT IT'S STILL A FREE DAY

IT’S GREYING OVER, BUT IT’S STILL A FREE DAY

It’s greying over, but it’s still a free day,

no rent, no hydro, no gas, no car insurance,

to write, to paint, to let time grow like a weed

as I pace my apartment from studio to scriptorium

where I write apostate holy books in the margins

of my colas and kells. And not care if I’m a cult or not,

if I’ve got any followers, if there’s a stake somewhere

with my name on it, in Venice, Giordano Bruno,

writhing in flames because he believed

everything was alive and should be greeted as such

and so do I. Hunter’s moon again when

the heretics are culled. What did the wolves do

before the hunters came? Licensed to kill,

but it isn’t the same. No red dye or cellophane.

The flowerless daylilies are buried in leaves.

They paint carbon copies of themselves

on the walls of their cement caves. I wonder

if solar panels will ever know what autumn means

to these that are banked like cornflakes

out of the box. Is there a prize for the most

graceful swan dive into yesterday’s junkmail?

Blood and bone, does leafmeal keep

the rabbits and deer away from a garden

with budrot because the grower’s greedy

and feckless? A matchbox of pot from the sixties,

for free believe it or not, unschooled in the tactics

of the gram masters of Gore Street keeping

the price of peace with a smile on its face, high.

Mary Jane, the holy. Street queen without

portfolio, the pimps have turned you out

under a lamp post, packaged for a trick to double-park.

Are you the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene?

Leaned into any power windows lately?

The world corrupts the gifts it didn’t steal.

I can remember the west coast in l966

but what’s the point? The mortgage came due

on those ideals, and the creative imagination

has been squatting on Crown land ever since.

Liberation. By accident. But how do you

chain water up like a dog to a fire hydrant?

I let my mind skate two lengths of the canal.

I pity the poor watersnakes whose nightmare

is Alexander the Great’s solution to tying

yourself up in knots for the winter months to come.

Nothing else to do when you don’t drink,

in a small town, at fifteen below zero, but chill out.

Dealers do, but humans don’t live by bread alone.

You need a boost that lays you out like your girlfriend

or a bear skin rug that’s given up on the dump

and gone into hibernation. Wonder if Krishna

were ever mauled in his sleep by a grizzly

who eats you like a lotus that moved in a dream

of salmon swimming up the foodstream to die

in the sacred gene-pool of a waterclock timed to sex?

I can smell the leaves burning from here. Come

the snow, ten cubic cords of acrid two year old

red oak no one’s ever prized for its mistletoe.

Depends on who lies down on the pyre

the message the wind sends about the afterlife

of the fire that’s blazing like a furnace in a funeral home.

Black smoke or white, everyone’s infallibly

been elected pope. Except for the heretics

who are in on the joke. Whatever gets them through

the night, mortally wounded by their own boredom.

A secular kind of tolerance that doesn’t reform anything.

But gives death as wide a berth as life.

That observes, for the most part, the desperation

in the chokecherries and berries of most people’s hearts.

One foot in summer and the other in a lifeboat

crushed like a milkweed pod or a hull

from the Franklin expedition in Hudson’s Bay

until the first snow overwhelms them like a morphine drip

supported by a human fighting for its life

and that’s the end of their nostalgia for dislocated hips.

The crosswalks get wiped out. The Iroquois

still make us run through a gauntlet of sticks and stones

to get to Giant Tiger on a Wednesday when

everything’s been marked down like a cemetery on sale.

The road is doing figure-eights with a bull whip

in each hand as if it were trying to imitate a snakepit.

The journey stings, Momma, the journey stings.

My nerves sing like downed hydro lines to the rain and the ice.

But never let me forget the way a country road

one car wide, winds with a mind of its own

that’s superior to mine, whatever I’m driving

like a Ford l50 or the sun god’s chariots in eclipse

so everything looks fine until the diamond cutter’s

Vajrayana, reveals to the little and big vehicles,

no one knows the road better than a shot-up mailbox

knocked over by a snowplough with a blade

that reflects the moon like one of its phases

or a planet like earth at odds with its own ecliptic

twenty three and a half degrees off upright

with the solar plane of its own dinner table

so both sides of the pig on the spit get done

as if someone were glazing an oil painting

in translucent lacquers that didn’t yellow

except for the dog stain and the wild siloes

of the long grain and grasses that stuck it out in the snow.

PATRICK WHITE