WATCHING MY MIND WALK ITS OWN WATERS

WATCHING MY MIND WALK ITS OWN WATERS

Day 13:

Two hours sleep out of the last twenty-four. Exhausted. Blurred.

Even the smudges have medicinal value. The lightning definitely

hit the transformer yesterday. Here are the fireworks. Ignore, read,

scratch your head, speculate on the comparative creative psychodynamics of

Sisyphus and Chernobyl, whatever you want to do. Ok with me.

Read them serially like a totem pole. Or pick them up individually

like an occasional interesting leaf you findd at your feet. These

poems feel supercharged with a significance that seems to be

resonating throughout out everything I say, do, love, write, think and feel.

Pages turning, but the book’s a tree. Given the number of poems

from yesterday I’m about to post, and how taxing and time consuming the act

of posting them seriatim en masse is, I think from now on, I will post them

as they’re tentatively finished. Easier on you, that way. And easier

on me. Matter of husbanding chores and energies. Also think it’s more

open that way for both writer and reader. Puts more unbounded sky

into each flightpath and gives them room to shed, flap, fly. Or decide

they’re not a bird, they’re a tent. Doesn’t monumentalize the air with an avalanche

or meteor shower of gravestones at a bingo of extinction events, keeping,

in mind, we owe one them, at least, partially, our own mammalian proliferation.

Solar flaring, then, not publishing. I’d love to hang on to a fat head. Carry it

around with me under my arm. Consult it at parties like a Ouji board. But, I

don’t have the space for it. And if it starts to develop an ego where am I going

to put it? Lot of space out here, but I’m not sure about the living room yet.

Little tight I’d say at this point for an ego. Letting the light go. Though

no less care I assure you goes into writing one of these than has gone

into anything I’ve ever written. Possibly more because I am surgically

curious to know how deeply the meds have dug down into Mt. Helicon to establish their own wellspring, inclusive, but separate from the others I’m used to drawing upon. See if

the pharmaceuticals are fracking my good housewells. Good. This part done.

Never thought I’d ever be so happy to see prose on daylight savings time again. Lol

Nurse called. Pulmonary esophogeal biopsy in Kingston on Friday. Feel like

Dorothy skipping down the yellow brick road to defrock the Wizard of Oz

in a strange kind of way. Possibly a black lightning bolt from the brain pan

of the Sahara. But I’m staying as open and alert to whatever comes next.

Till then plan to use the unperturbed time in between as wisely and vividly

as I can. Write poems in the eye of the hurricane happy as a bird enthroned

as a peasant king on one of his own thermals. Ride the bannisters. Love, Patrick.

Watching my mind walk its own waters

like a long-legged spider off the wharf of the moon at Long Bay.

A syringe just before it breaks the skin.

The moon’s a junkie. So am I. But it’s called medicine.

Ghostly, lonely, blue aura rise like the spiritual life of milk.

Glow softly. Shine. Teach all these tears they’re light.

Veils. Melancholic solar flares bruised by the night they entered.

Marigolds among the waterlilies. Stars in the dark when they’re wet.

How easy the water pulses through its own veins like love

and a dark circus on stilts. Horror with a thorax

and a tumour to compare to. Perish the thought,

Yorik’s got better things to do than be afraid of you.

Gonna fly. Gonna fly over the whole earth

and prove there are extraterrestrials though that’s a sad joke.

Ambivalence wrecks everything like crumpled tinfoil.

Should have been a star. But I never wanted to shine like that.

Not sharp. Blunted by the heart. I took an edge off.

Looks better on me I think than all that warpaint.

How to teach scalpels to build their own aquarium.

Flowers how to make the bed. And live through the leaves.

Startling I said that like a star in the east above the treeline.

Such a small space to couch enormity in

as if it had seasons. My mother knows about this. She’s wise

as a bell that’s been crying. Me? I’m a waterbird

when I want to be. My solitude’s almost a woman.

So that’s me. I was curious. And little fella I think we’re fucked.

No more riverboats. Maybe one, but it sunk. Glad

I got that out of the way of that old, Medusan tree stump.

And got away with a rhyme that makes me look cleverer

than I am, but I think I’m going to take the bow anyway.

I’m feeling sorry for myself. You, too, if you want to know the truth.

Milky moonlight. It’s Celtic as snow in summer, beautiful

but cold as a flower that treasures its loneliness.

I’d rather sleep with a rose than a waterlily.

But I suppose that’s all over now, baby blue.

Let the feelings come through as they will

like freshwater dreams from the woods. Hey, that’s pretty good.

What am I looking at? Data. Raw data. Brutal mercy

with a quiet told you so. As if it was my fault

and I don’t care if it is. I got to see this, didn’t I?

Picture it as a kind of beautiful blue moon in late October

that sings in a choir of razorblades that haven’t

been threshed yet. Ever see a cornfield of trashed ribbons?

That’s what I’m afraid of. The snapping turtle

that unfeathered the moon. Feels a little bit like rape to me.

Am I in prison? Or is this Promethean? What do you say?

Want to look at the moon with me? Hear me expiate

on everything under the sun at midnight as if it had gone somewhere?

I sing like time got stuck in my voice like a grackle or a black box

in a morning chimney pipe. And so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes

like a waterclock. Is there meaning in that enough

to drink from your skull cup down to the lees of your heart.

That old fortune teller with an eyepatch and a scarf

for a bloodstream. Can you see the sphinx underneath

her mascara? She’s wearing midnight with partial eclipses.

And it’s a delusion. I’m sure about that. But I think

she just winked at me like a starmap. Old bat. Imagine that.

I’m showing off. And it’s sad as the tears deep down

in the nature of things. The lachrymae dolorosae that beads

the leaves like lampshades and party clowns.

Hand me that waterfall. I think I want to drown.

Be serious. There are people around. Listening

to the shedding of the leaves that whisper something about autumn

in their ears. Eyes like the embers of an old fire

going through its jewels in the dark. Who loved you?

Did he treat you right? Or do you still carry a bruise on your heart

like a poison apple you want to give somebody as a surprise?

And miss all this for that. I’m the plague rat. You

be somebody else. And we’ll look at the moon together

on the edge of the world. We’ll resonate with our assessment

of what it is to stand here and just look. Just look.

PATRICK WHITE