THE DAY WITH NO AMBITIONS. GREY. GREY.
The day with no ambitions. Grey. Grey.
Stained-glass stars chained at the
window,
Medusan mobiles hang like jellyfish,
motionless solar systems frozen in
time,
mystic blue of burned out candle
holders,
their flicker of light, a Monarch
butterfly
in winter, perfectly intact, a wick in
a pool of wax.
Sunday morning. Five churches open.
No carillon of bells. Four liars and
one
that’s trying to face the facts.
Bank, cafe,
Mac’s, gas station, a hospital with a
landing pad
helicoptering the week-end’s heart
attacks to Ottawa.
Soiled snow slobbering in the gutters
of a bleak street. Heritage fieldstone
refitted with aluminium windows,
grandpa
in sunglasses where the old meets the
new.
Among the local tribes, Scottish
settlers,
Irish immigrants, British half pay
officers,
even if you’ve lived here a hundred
and fifty years
you’re still passing through.
Good-bye. Good-bye.
Not enough dead in my past to be one of
you.
A chubby adolescent primes his black
baseball cap,
hitches up his pants, swings the door
open
to the crowded cafe where there might
be girls
as lonely as he is, and makes a hopeful
grand entrance.
A grey haired woman darts from the bank
like a sparrow who knows her business.
Retirement capital of Canada, things
advance
from accident to accident like the old
woman
last summer who stopped her car without
warning
in the middle of the road and got out
to ask
the passers-by if anyone knew how to
park it.
The lamp posts straight as florist’s
daffodils
but one uprooted by a drunk, leaning
like a mast
to starboard, counterpointing the
upright by contrast.
An orange cone, thumb-tacking the spot
something happened out of the usual to
make
Sunday worth talking about after the
plates
are pushed away and the waitress comes
to the table
knowing what everyone takes in their
coffee
without having to ask if they’re from
here or not.
Everyone lives as if they’d just read
The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock, though I doubt
they’ve heard of Eliot.
You can tell by the way they walk how
long
they’ve been landlocked beside the
Rideau Canal
without mermaids, though they stock the
lakes
with fingerlings of small mouth bass
for American fishermen.
All well and good, I say, all well and
good
though the suicide rate among the
teen-agers
is the highest in the valley, I’m not
passing judgement
from the God’s eye view of my
upstairs apartment window.
I’m not logging the cadavers of dead
trees
in the cemetery of a frozen swamp in
winter.
I’m not trying to thaw the dreams of
the mosquitoes out
beside the stove. Life here is a home
remedy
for everything, mystic bumbleberry pies
cooling
on the farmyard windowsills of rustic
sibyls
who usually know more about what you
need
than you do in the afterlife of some
psychic catastrophe
and more often than not are uncannily
right.
When it’s not being shown how to do
things the smart way,
talent is quietly scorned by the
schadenfreude
of incontestable skills that know how
to fix it on their own.
Confess your helplessness with
inquisitive humility
and everyone turns into Aristotle in a
teaching cave
and shows you how to patch a leak in
your radiator
on the cheap with eggs and pepper, or
keep
the window in your woodstove clean by
making
a paste of its ashes and rubbing it
into your third eye
to get the soot and creosote off the
way a poet
looks at things sometimes like an
ambassador in chains
through a glass darkly, burning like a
cubic cord
of green wood hissing at what the
nightbirds used to sing
before the chainsaws showed up like a
chorus
of morose delectation in the perils of
insufficiency.
Better not to wear your surrealism on
your sleeve
and keep your longings to yourself. If
you get caught
crying out loud over some real or
imagined agony
and you’re not a girl, things can get
dismissively rougher.
Real men don’t waste their time
feeling things
that can’t be fixed with tools.
Fortunately for me
I’ve got a paint brush and a canvas I
stretch
like a tarp on a pickup, though the
poetry’s
harder to explain than the logic of
metaphors
in a hardware store with emergency
generators on sale.
Isolation’s just a red shift in
solitude and my loneliness
is a small price to pay to get a lot of
work done
like Roger Bacon in a woodshed without
being accused
that often, of witchcraft. More
hermetic by acclamation
than intent, an occupational hazard of
what I do,
I’ve always got the river at night if
I need someone to talk to,
and the companionable eyes of the stars
to overcome
the cruelty of my cosmic cabin fever
when space
turns to glass, and it gets so cold and
impersonal in the abyss
even death shudders like a calving
glacier when it realizes
how much holier things seem in my
absence
than it could ever hope to be while I
remained alive
to put the lie to it, like people in a
small town, who survive.
PATRICK WHITE
