I'M SITTING DOWN ALONE AT A POKER-FACED TABLE

I’M SITTING DOWN ALONE AT A POKER-FACED TABLE

Day Five: Please forgive this torrent of poetry that’s about to break

like a beaver dam flooding whatever road you’re on.

In my present state of mind it’s hard to tell if I’m just

drumming myself into a trance because I’m scared

or a boy whistling down the road in the dark to himself,

ironically enough, hoping nothing in the dark bushes

is really listening to what he’s trying to say to himself

as if things were normal, and he was just talking in his sleep

in a bad dream again. And I have absolutely, do you hear me,

absolutely no right to expect anyone to feel obligated

to read anything I may well be imposing upon them here.

Feel free or not as you please to read, as I hope you’ve always done

to beat the stumps with that old shepherd’s crook of compassion

as if were just another stick you picked up in your wandering

to see if any rabbits jump out this black magician’s hat

I’m trying my very best to live in like a Selkirk chimney

or a silver rocket on a gantry pad that’s about to launch me

into God knows where but apparently I’m the lucky monkey that gets to go.

An astrochimp wired to what the cosmodoctors want to know,

or a catscan tobaggan with a laser halo in a tunnel of love

that might have people I love waiting for me at the end of it

or not, and since I’m more of a poet than a cowboy,

a moonrise I can ride off into that reconciles the two

until the dark matter’s finally resolved when my bones turn to dust.

But there I am again going on about nothing as I always have

and I don’t mean to do that. I honestly don’t. I just don’t

have it in me to be minimalist enough so I ask you

not to blame the gold mine because it isn’t an engagement ring.

I could slip a little golden zero on your finger like a halo

or the ripple of a raindrop in the sun, or an elegant moondog

the silver rubs off but it’s always been in my nature

because of the way I was brought up, to have done with it

and give you the whole motherlode, because when

has enough of enough ever been enough, and though life

might not cherish what it creates, haven’t you noticed

how it squanders what it creates so beautifully and lavishly

like stars and butterflies, lovers and children in the park,

you want to live forever as if life were never enough?

So I’m about to post four poems like lifeboats

on this the fifth day away from shore, because

this is the dock where they belong, knocking their empty skulls

together like bumper cars, or if you’re luckier, and

I hope you are, a cargo full of moonlight that might

help you one day, as it has me so far, to see in the dark.

By your fruits you shall know them. Here’s my little apple tree.

Help yourself as you please, whether you’re a bear

or a bird or a bee or an angry wasp, or even a junkie

looking for a hit of apple bloom in your life. Free. No charge.

Like that hamper of books in the doorway you always stop to browse.

I’m sitting down alone at a poker-faced table

revealing my cards as I have to, concealing the rest,

hoping death doesn’t call my brave boyish bluff

at holding a royal flush when all I’ve got in my hand

is a few peasant deuces with street smarts,

and a feeble hope I can clear the pot on the table

before it does by raising the stakes and demanding

I show him what I’ve got. Not much, and possibly

even less than that if it all comes down to one serious moment

that passes its time outside this waterclock bloodsport

of broken hearts that feel they’ve already lost too much

in life to carry on any further than the last rapid

of white water they ran, as they hear the approaching roar

of the precipitous waterfalls up ahead, and they have

no way of plumbing how deep that is, as they keep

calling out to the stern of their shipwrecked, paper-birch canoe,

closer and closer to the edge, three bells and all’s well,

man the lifeboats, but remember, and my mother taught

me this, despite some nasty attitudes who are righteously

young and primitive enough not to have outgrown a point to prove,

as they will when the first flower blooms for them

and they wake up like eyes to see whose heart

has been looking at them all this time like wind-blown

ungenetically modified or poisoned by neonicontinoidal pollen

every minute mustard seed of is the whole universe.

Women and children first as always and for a million years to come.

Remember the Buddha? I see it a bit a lot like him, it seems.

A dream, a cloud, a dewdrop, a lightning flash and fireflies.

Lightning and Fireflies. God, it already terrifies me

that I’m beginning to remember that as if I were

already nostalgically spiritual. Will I be happy,

will I be sad (wasn’t that a song that used to pick

the petals off a twelve string guitar carved out of heartwood

to see if she really loved him or not?) for the things I did or didn’t do

for myself, when I had one, and the people in my life

I ignored when they cried out the most for help?

Or will the jury hang this way forever like a blue vision

of Billy Holiday’s strange fruit hung by the neck

as if they nothing more than coyotes and coydogs

and bush wolves that used to howl with the moon in Lanark?

Watch out for the sky when it begins to shower like chandeliers

of star-frosted mirrors and tears of rain, they’ll kill you

as fast as that black comic opera of a candelabra

hanging over your head by a thread like a bouquet

of flowers all these swords of Damocles are laying

like deadly nightshade on your grave like a wreath

you received from the assassin you raised like a deathwish

and now you’re getting what you subconsciously wished for

all along. Or maybe it’s just the optical effect

of the candle burning down to the navel of its umbilical wick.

Or reading too much Rilke, or listening to an orgy of Jim Morrison

sing this is the end my only friend as somebody realizes the music is over

and it’s time to turn out the lights before you go.

But please don’t complicate what I’ve just written with courage,

I am afraid, but the only reason I could write that

is thanks to this unforgiving disciple that’s been

a slave driver to me over the last few thousand lifetimes

of going supernova and falling apart as a poet,

(Talk about a horse that ferociously wants you off its back

before it’s going to let you come anywhere near its spine

with your spurred heals dug like burrs under the saddle

on its winged flanks. Ride it lightly as you can. It’s

a cowboy pony who will do most of the work for you,

effortless effort, if you let it slacken the reins on your spine a bit.)

I could project and derive nuances of many meanings

in what I’ve just written, but I think I just gave a brief

creative writing lesson, and you have to forgive me quick

for believing I’m sure I know what I’m talking about.

Looking back as obviously I am doing now,

it would be rather pithy don’t you think if I were to say

radically enough, a kickback from the sixties, a good education

is one part knowledge, nine tenths the best guess,

and the infinity of zeroes of emptiness in a good bluff

that seems to run on only in long, incommensurable periodic sentences

and logorrheics that I keep an eye on not becoming

with varying degrees of success, because, believe me

this scares the shit out of me. Especially when,

as Woodrow said when the Irish boy fell into

a water mattress of breeding water-moccasins

that struck at him like a machine-gun, as everyone

watched with tears and wonder and fear in their eyes,

as he twitched his nervous way into death

the only thing you can do about death is ride away from it

and then looked around for some expedient means

to keep the herd moving toward Montana. Giddy-up.

It’s time to get the herd rolling again. And, of course,

I agree with Icarus, he’s right. And that’s what

makes him a man you’d rather follow than teach to lead.

He gets things going. Knowing if the river

doesn’t keep moving the waters of life grow brackish and fester

like a wound that hasn’t been attended to

and even the most ancient galaxies of waterlilies

shining out of the deep past with a Tuareg’s respect

for mirages and water gardens with underground rivers,

and even all the beautiful, creatively loving illusions of the Alhambra

revert back quickly enough into the swamp

when their lotus dream is over and the sky

is coming on again on the morning shift

to replace all those lamp posts that come out at night

like fourth magnitude stealthy Morlocks on the graveyard shift

just as the ghosts of stars are returning to the cemetery

when the sun comes up,the unbroken yolk of an embryonic bluebird.

And it’s either seven come eleven or snake-eyes

when you throw yourself around like bones in your head,

asking the beautiful woman beside to blow on the dice,

(This is getting suspiciously close to sounding like a Freudian

blowjob. Forgive me. But it’s completely spontaneous.

Like a wet dream you’re having in a love affair with life

to swipe a brownie off Robert Frost’s table in passing.)

But it’ll do. And who have I ever been to judge what’s

inappropriately imprurient and what’s not.

As long as it helps you to get your ambiguous point across

all those bridges burning behind you I’m sure

are going to replace the measure of a metre in Paris

or the gold standard on Wall Street as a way

of quantifying the quality of what I’m talking about.

Now watch this. You see the way I dog-paddle my way

around this bend in the river as if I were turning a trope

I learned like a rope trick from Shakespeare, not

Edward de Vere, I know how much a poor boy

can be hated for making money off of the pursuit

of an earthly excellence by an institution that’s not.

Money in his case. I haven’t done anywhere near as well.

And I don’t think I want to turn over that old rock

of an institutional skull to see what’s under it, but I can guess.

And I didn’t drink these words like a waterfall of spit

out another man’s mouth. Whether you think of them

as drool from the lips of a tobacco chewer, or

good saliva of the realm. When I spit. Like a cobra

not the Taliban, it’s all my own, like a toxic revelation

from Allah, or a deadly gunslinger from a cowboy movie

that’s been going on all day in my head, with a quick draw.

Remember the scene in Tombstone when Doc Holiday

said to Johnny Ringo out in the woods who was expecting

Wyatt Earp, who was a woosy in Johnny Ringo’s eyes

compared to Doc Holiday who scared him to death,

two snakes facing each other down to see who would

get one double barreled trigger finger of a lightning strike

down the middle of an oak tree standing out alone in a field,

Odin hanging on his ash as a sacrifice he makes to himself

on the axis mundi of the world gun barrel that points out true north in a flash

as pow you watch the space capsule of Doc Holiday’s bullet

enter Johnny Ringo’s third eye as if Doc were proofreading his forehead

where everything is written there your eyes will ever see,

a fate you might live to regret, when you’ve got nothing else

to live for, and there’s a gnawing emptiness inside

you were born from an egg oviparously and not a warm-blooded womb

and as soon as the breach birth baby comes out the midwives

wash it down and anointed it in the bathwaters

of its own grave, and let somebody else decide to give it a name.

That job apparently fell to me for the last sixty-five years.

And since I’ve already sworn enough in this poem

to get kicked off poemhunter because I didn’t wash

my mouth out with vinegar, but decided to go drinking

this firewater until I blacked out naturally because

I couldn’t handle it, and thought things might get better

in the morning, and surprisingly, no one more than me, have,

I’m going to say it right out loud, Who the fuck

was I while I was still alive enough to care? I’ve got

to put somebody’s name on this grave before I lose

this last chance to know before the table’s cleared

like the threshing floor of the moon with a sweep

of the last crescent arm of its crone phase that looks

more like a sickle, or a fang, or the lapwing

of an unpaired parenthesis trying to keep its shit together

or some kind of fish hook or perverse thorn

you have to push all the way through until it

either kills you or you lay it down like sword

in tribute when it gets to the other side of the river,

or it’s game over, you’re done like burnt toast

as they say when men are trying to act tough,

nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing to one.

And it’s time to lay it down gently brother, lay it down,

gently, like a posthumous loveletter you wanted to be found

like a card up your sleeve you’ve had there all along,

and never abused by trying to win anything

other than the occasional heart or two who were worthy

one way or another, for a moment or two

of getting you to break your rule like a nightbird

witching wand wish bone flute whenever it got close enough

to the housewells and watersheds of life it’s always

been looking for even as a mirage in this desert of stars

that’s shaped hemispherically with an hourglass figure

to keep you exploring the abyss for it as I will be if I can

long after my eyes have turned to clouds on the wind

and my silver tongued delusions that never fooled

anyone more than me, who almost made a religion out them,

before I cleaned my act up and learned to live like

the apostate, heretical, outlaw poet of the heart

which is enough of an error of perception to believe

that’s what I might have been over a whole lifetime

of not really knowing for sure. But acting on Blakes’ advice

about fools and sacred clowns mellowing into the beautifully wise

like butter and ice floes and snowmen that remind you

of dolmenic ice-cream cones in the Arctic when its melts,

even a good guess is enough of a persistent folly

to keep life loving you over a whole lifetime without

rapping on about it like a Hegelian cowboy philosopher,

but a poet, and that’s all I’m going to write. Poet. And that’s it.

Like a red lighthouse above an emergency exit to keep

people from floundering on the rocks of their own hearts

when they hear the mermaids singing as they did for me

when I was a seahorse and used to go jumping with them

like dolphins at the prow of the moon, and let’s be honest, a seagull, too.

Or maybe even the broken arrow of an unfledged albatross.

And I can remember like some Iranian Pythagoras in Crotona

or Ojibway out in Westport before the loggers and real estate agents

who forgot that nobody owns the earth, unless

they’re into pimping out their mothers for cash instead of apple bloom

when I was being scattered once like these ashes from the urn

of a Canada goose migrating south in the body of a bird,

a transmigration of Carpathian angels with the soul of the blues,

but as you can see, I’m just as helpless now as I was then

to know who I might have been. So I don’t know. You guess.

But don’t let me hear you say Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare

in front of me ever again. I can remember, at least,

when I was a shrieking red tailed hawk with a moonful of open claws

about to demonstrate to some poor little mouse

whose luck had run out its the tail being held over a snakepit

whose fangs were the firesticks of the triune identity of the world

with tuning forks and the Neptunian tridents of a Pacific

west coast sea devil from the lunatic fringe of North America

when everybody advanced their dancing more than they did their careers.

Not amen. But absitomen. May no evil come of my words

other than that I intended when somebody was offended

by birds singing in the chimney in the morning as they woke me up

to what’s truly beautiful about this world when you get

to choose your own cage, whether it be the heart of a woman or a man or a child

or an art that’s never let you down like a coffin into your grave from the start.

And I’ve been given no good reason yet to believe won’t do now.

Though as I said before that always sounds braver when I say it

than when I hold it timorously within my shaking silence

not to betray it like the first and last rule of a noble calling that appealed

to a blue-blooded aristocratic poet as my mother used to say

I had a hamburger wallet with a champagne taste for women and lyrics.

Seagulls pleading in my wake for someone to translate them into nightingales

that used to blow up without warning like a squall of stars

when you were out skimming the waves of your own sea of awareness

and like the Samurai in the orchard in the movie looking for

the perfect frame of a blossom, just like the thought waves of the sea,

there’s no reason to play favourites when they’re all perfect just as they are.

But that’s just me again trying to be the Pacific unafraid of its own weather.

PATRICK WHITE