WATCHING MIRRORS ON A CATWALK
Watching mirrors on a catwalk
but none of them interest me.
Disembodied as a play without a stage
it takes time to know where to stand.
I take my heavy winter boots off
like two starless nights. The smoke
is wiser than the candle, but who
cares?
Looking for the pure space, the little
white square
the shrink told me she discovered
at the centre of my heart like an
albino sunspot
but no one was there. Excruciating
solitude.
Times, I swear, even death feels
lonely.
Comes from looking at too many stars.
Looking for an intimacy so deep within
the abyss
it turns me inside out like the eyelids
of an orange
without wedging the full moon apart
into segments.
The peers of my high school annual
predicted
I was mostly likely to become a mad
teacher,
a mad scientist, a mad poet, mad. Four
careers
and I’m retroactively mastering the
last.
It’s haunted me like the Sibyl of
Cumae for lightyears.
I thought if I pushed the envelope
people would receive it as a kind of
loveletter.
Peace in your soul you can always
live it like a dream when the craziness
gets out of hand but I was a firestorm
of sidereal insights in a lighthouse
built like an obelisk on lunar
quicksand.
Sometimes you’re better off at sea
than landing with high hopes for your
lifeboats
on some coasts. Wasn’t sure if mine
were among them,
but why take a chance? I warned people
away from me.
There were happier islands you could be
washed up on.
Strange the life I’ve been living
like a quixotic crusade
against all ideas and forms of art that
lack compassion,
breaking up continents like loaves of
bread
for the ugly ducklings and the
mysterious black swans
that move through the water like the
reflections
of total eclipses, just to diversify
the species of my solitude.
Poetry has made a thematic habit of my
discontinuity.
At the top of every totem pole I’ve
ever carved
out of the forests of Vancouver Island
I was raised in,
there’s a hidden nightbird with its
wings folded
like a black dove perched on the axis
mundi of my serpent fire.
The songs I sing can’t be rehearsed
by a choir.
Spontaneity keeps me from looking like
a liar
in the eyes of the stars when they
overhear me talking to myself.
Crazy wisdom. Bright vacancy. Dark
abundance.
You’ve got to keep saying yes, yes,
yes, to the light,
to the dark, to life, to love, to
solitude, grief, despair
and all their attendant transformations
if you want to stay sincere.
Visions of life. The twenty seven year
old hooker
so strung out on cocaine in the bank
robber’s house
where there wasn’t so much as a spoon
or a fork or a plate,
she was a black, aniconic madonna of
pain,
the paint rag of a thousand fantasies
from fairy dust
to snakepits, none of them her own.
The coke white blankness of a bright
vacancy
enslaving her dark abundance like
shadows at noon.
The crone of her infancy, a withered
spring.
I’ve been holding back my tears like
an ice-age ever since.
Life can be as cold as an exacto knife
as often
as it lets you feel its wisdom ripening
like an apple
in the sunset just as the air is
beginning to cool off
from labouring so intensely all day at
minding flowers and the stars,
by God, the stars are distilled from a
thousand lovers’ eyes.
The syrinx selects its own song when
nobody’s using it.
And I’d rather fail, throwing my
voice like a sparrow
against a windowpane keeping me from
the sky
until it breaks and I’m grounded at
the roots
of the prima donnas of the cosmos in
their ballet slippers
dancing on the wind. Say it all in one
big-hearted metaphor
like the roar of a dragon with a
compassionate heart,
so that every poem I ever wrote was a
fleet of lifeboats
flying the skull and crossbones like a
shepherd of wolves
that knew how to howl at the moon like
smoke from a distant fire
and I was poet enough to know that
madness
is just another form of prayer. Be
that. Without compromise.
Rather than disrespect my life and art
by taking notes.
If you’re making a gift of a gift
don’t call it a sacrifice.
Still within you, I swear, my gun-shy
brother,
my reticent sister, despite all your
wary attempts
to the contrary, there resides a jewel,
and you can call me a fool if you want,
a star sapphire, let’s say, because
that’s my birth stone
and I had one once that was given to me
by a lover,
a radiance like white phosphorus
starclusters
that burns through everything from
children’s skin
to the comets of kelp rinsing their
hair in the tide
as they root their eyes in starmud like
black ribbons
undone on a gift of life, or streamers
on a girl’s first bike.
This jewel cuts through the void like a
scalpel of starlight.
It’s an intimacy with your own
awareness that leaves
everybody standing at the gate a
stranger to themselves.
This is that homespun genius that makes
its own clothes
like the moon to cover its nakedness in
raiments of light
and takes in everybody under the cloak
of its eclipse
like the leather yurt of a dragon
giving shelter to birds
that are afraid of the lightning under
its fireproof wings.
This is the labour of a lifetime spent
on the flash of a firefly.
This is the lantern you’ve carried
before you for lightyears
like a nightwatchman into the dark to
see if there was
anyone else there who was as scared as
you were to find out.
This is the work that taught you to be
just as fulfilled
by what you failed at as you were empty
when they handed you a fictitious
award.
And you knew immediately what a long
way back it was
to the anonymous sixties when you were
insignificant enough
to get some real work done and you
weren’t famous
for the way you worship everything
under the sun.
The uniqueness of your eyes might
evaporate
like snowflakes of dry ice with the
fragrance
of cornflowers tossed into a grave like
the sad, longing
in the afterthoughts of a Neanderthal
mother,
but your seeing, not what your looking
at,
is as ageless and unperishing in its
formlessness as ever.
And though you might have changed the
covers
from pulp to hardback sometime in the
early Cambrian,
none of your emotions and many yet to
come
that have been left unthumbed like the
novels of friends,
have grown any older under the
carapaces
of your prophetic skulls trying to
balance
the lunacy of a spare harvest moon on
your head
while you’re crossing an exhausted
suspension bridge.
Like I said, I don’t need to make a
choir out of my voice
to listen to the sacred syllables
whispering
in the autumn aspen trees to know
there’s something sacred
in the silence that follows the wind
isn’t revealing
like a poem that wasn’t written to be
overlooked or not.
I’ve lapped the marrow from the
broken koans
in the terrible lairs of the gods, and
I’ve sung
the dead up out of the coffins of the
sunflowers
knowing they’d look back eventually
at their own shadows
but it might prove crucial to the state
of their afterlives
that someone who loved them at least
gave it a good try.
Magnificent the life within you, isn’t
it? The way
its freedom never gets caught in any
sudden squall
of golden chains you might want to
weigh it down with
like the spiritual bling of maidens of
the mist with rainbows
to dazzle the eyes of the blind into
believing what they hope for?
Kids and wives, divorces like horrible
vacations,
lovers that painted their nails in
blood like razorblades,
brute dung heaps who snarled like
distempered carnivores
under a heavy snowfall, forgetting no
real shepherd of wolves
would be caught dead in sheep’s
clothing. Disappointment
turned out to be more of a perennial
than a one night stand.
You began to understand why God bewails
human ingratitude.
And it was the folly of common sense
when you were paranoid
to close your eyes like the granite
crypt of your afterlife
against the superstitious shadows of
the approaching grave-robbers.
You brought it all with you. Did you
really think
you could leave it behind like a
dogstar
you tried to ditch in the country to
give it
some chance of spiritual survival like
a fire in the wild
that could live off the land without it
following you
like a return journey for the rest of
your forsaken way?
It’s not that wonderful,
heart-thawing, mystical acts
of human compassion have stopped
happening
like oxygen and fire breaking into
tears, it’s just
the turn of the miracles to lose their
faith in us
like the hurt feelings of beautifully
rejected lovers.
Something about the way love bonds both
sides
of an open wound as wide as an
expanding universe
like a maternal welder kissing our
injuries into stronger scars.
Zen cracks in a teacup mended with
gold.
Stop trying to sift through the middens
of your past
like an archaeological dig in the
starfields
you were trying to build an on ramp to
the Road of Ghosts in,
and when you’re woken up in the small
hours of the morning
by the dead who’ve got nothing but
time on their hands
until dawn, and they ask you what you
were dreaming
don’t answer like a seance addressing
yourself to their absence.
Sometimes you just have to leave some
things unburied
in the Valley of the Kings and Queens
and move on
to second-guessing the tumblers like
habitable planets
in possible solar systems like ours on
the locks
of the stargates of Orion that will
know you by the way you knock
not by the junkyard of sacred relics
you’ve been hoarding.
If you dump your own redundancy, you’ll
travel a lot lighter.
If you don’t forget the hidden jewel
within you
has long had a place among the stars,
whose eyes
I ask you, even after all these seeing
nights and lightyears
of peering through a glass darkly, a
candle in a lantern
released like a firefly to find its way
home, could shine
any brighter than the waterstars and
starmud of yours are now?
PATRICK WHITE
