I'M DROPPING ASHES ON BUDDHA PINOCCHIO

I’M DROPPING ASHES ON BUDDHA PINOCCHIO

I’m dropping ashes on Buddha Pinocchio.

Brushing them off his lap, sweeping them off the desk,

trying to keep urns of them away from the keyboard

with a stubby little brush that looks like Hitler’s moustache.

Or Goring’s toothbrush. So much soiled purity.

In the acts of love we attend to. So much swamp

with the waterlilies. So much ore with the gold.

So much rain in a glass of trees. So many ashes to scatter

like a dead storm that’s snuffed itself out on a grey wind

that rises like a smoke bandanna over the sun on the horizon.

Cherry red. Like a tumour. But enough said. It’s not

about that eraser head. Pink nibbling nipple.

It’s about lunettes and nibs like spearheads that penetrate

your heart like Clovis points flint knapped plalanged in Solutria

as they inched around the ice age page

by snow white page by page by glacial ice sheet

to make it all the way to North America

in time to disappoint the natives in the Bering Strait

as founding peoples of two entire continents

with what a dust storm induced by the Younger Dryas ice age

can do to wipe people out with most of the larger animals

buried whether they lay down for or stood up to the dust.

Whole two continents kissing an hourglass isthmus

just like an image in Buddha Pinocchio’s blind mind.

You’ve got to attend to this as if you were responsible

for the death blossoms of his pygmy apple trees

and Japanese plums losing their eyelids to squanderous visions

that rain back down to earth volcanic down

like Pompey and Herculaneum sculpting dogs in agony.

PATRICK WHITE