ALWAYS WRITING IN THE SHADOW OF AN AVALANCHE

ALWAYS WRITING IN THE SHADOW OF AN AVALANCHE

Always writing in the shadow of an avalanche,

ashes on a white page, miscarriage of an urn,

are they mine, a freak of time, Stonehenge around a firepit?

My ears pinned flat against my head like a brow beaten cat,

waiting on the next move of a meteor shower

that’s been pummeling me like a clapper in a bell tower

that’s gone a couple of rounds too long

without calling off the fight. Firing squads

taking tickets and standing in line to shoot the stars

out of my eyes, like a repeating decimal, and here I am

writing another poem like a bird at the bars of a prison.

Beats staring down the plaster walls, the deserted street,

the middens of the Hooker’s green garbage bags

leaning against the parking meters like the afterlives

of prophetic archaeologists scrying my remains,

or trying to retain my composure in a snakepit of anxieties

like the third eye of a hurricane of razorwire

heading my way like a skill saw in a morgue

trepanning my skull cap off like a hard-boiled cosmic egg

to relieve the oceanic pressure of my underground madness

like the surface of Europa flowering

like a fountain of the sulphurous waters of life.

I was born trying to return to some place like a salmon

through a gauntlet of grizzlies, rocks, and eagles

as if only exiles find their way back home

from this turbulent sea of awareness upstream

against the flow of the mind to sort the swimmers

from the drowned. Have I spawned? Is it time to die?

Is my genome satisfied? Are the water sylphs

of the sacred pools gathered from the tears

of all those who cried out in vain for the unattainable

happy with the ingot of moonlight I’ve returned to them

like the blunted edge of a silver sword I will never

be called upon to use again like a third feather

in defence of the tribe in a hermetic holy war with myself?

I’ve always remembered what the garden-master asked

when I was boy. What’s madness but nobility of soul

at odds with circumstance? Meaning hydro, the rent, the heat,

the need to eat minimally, clothe yourself in the raiment

of the flowers of the field, keep the bearings in the wheel

of birth and death well-oiled to keep from seizing up

like the surgical amputation of my brother’s diabetic leg,

or the black dwarf with a clenched fist at the centre

of my solar system playing Russian roulette with itself

to clarify my nirvanic response to the trivial and tragically mundane

by showing my brain what an astronomic extinction event

looked like to the dinosaurs after years of volcanic activity

poisoning the atmosphere like acid rain thrown in the eyes

of the wildflowers learning to read the stars for themselves.

The night is cold and dark, eyeless, starless, indifferent

to people pleading at their windows for whatever they need

to survive their own minds in a sensory deprivation tank

of another night on earth of going without in the name

of an ambivalently greater radiance that can’t be measured

in candle flames and starmaps, but the light so pervasively intense

even your diamonds evaporate like dry ice and carbon directly

into the spiritual life of a lost atmosphere on a shepherd moon

that opens its heart like a meat locker to the question marks

it’s hooked on like a Sioux warrior at a sundance in Leo

with crescent moons pierced through its chest like a fish

acquiring prophetic powers in the rapture of the pain.

Angels singing in the autos da fe of unconfessed heretics

in an ancient agon of draconian flame throwers

and monkish fire hydrants outside the Scotia Bank across the street.

Scotia, the dark one, watching the watchers from boreal caves.

I don’t ride golden chariots through the slums

blithely dismissing other people’s pain like a new age

bureaucratically quoting their post-graduate karma

like a correct choice of shoes they made that don’t pinch

or slash your calves like first magnitude spurs

on your winged heels that at least get off the ground

as if a spiritual life were just a matter of footwear

and never walking anywhere barefoot with your own starmud

oozing between your toes on a long firewalk of ghosts

rising up into the air like smoke from the distant fires

of sea stars and galaxies flowing across the firmament

like the spilt milk of a lactating rheostat nursing Jupiter

in a cave in Crete to keep him from being eaten alive by Titans

lording the paternity of time over the maternal instincts of space.

But sometimes everyone needs a voice to ride with them

through the inverted arches of their triumphal defeats

to remind them they’re not mortal after the gates

close behind them in the wake of a book of poems

someone gave them to read like the heartwood of a sacred oak

standing up to the lightning in courageous dread

of what’s about to befall it like a crack of revelation

running like serpent fire from the roots up

to the sword that hangs like the Orion nebula

above the grailquests and cosmic eggcups

of Cygnus sticking its long neck out to swan

for the double-bladed axe of the waxing and waning moon

threshing the pawn shop mistletoe of the globular streetlights

with a golden sickle, coming and going, while I’m ploughing

lunar boustrophedons like the runes of retreating glaciers

into the mute rocks of the Canadian Shield weeping

lakes full of stars in the scars I’ve kept like vows

to get some sleep being carried home upon it

like Scutum in the southern hemisphere or the stretcher

of another poem by a conscientious objector summoned

by the siren of a singing ambulance, bound to the mast

of a shipwrecked world scuttled high and dry in the mountains

after the flood, apres moi le deluge, like the ark of the Burgess Shale.

PATRICK WHITE  

ACCORD ME A GENTLE THEME

ACCORD ME A GENTLE THEME

Accord me a gentle theme, just for a moment, let the world

touch me lightly as if I were a burn victim.

Too much hate and pain, the chronic atrocity

of everyone acting as lame as Jacob, Vulcan

and Richard III before they’ve even tried

wrestling with the angel in the way. I’ve deepened

my defeat. I’m growing immeasurably stronger.

I don’t insult the light by passing it through

phoney diamonds softened like processed honey

by mechanical bees with artificial sweeteners.

My eyes aren’t blunted and blurred by the foggy roses

of impressionist cataracts. Cataracts in the eye,

flowers in the sky. Flowers in the sky. Cataracts

in the eye. I don’t launder the grapes

or bloodstains on my auroras by pressing them

through the rollers of my mother’s washing machine

to keep them clean for houseguests who look

at the nymph of the moon as if it were always waxing

like first crescent, and forget the waning of the crone

and both those claws, like the thorns of a rose,

have been blooded in the human heart like the cold shock

of a plinth of glass when the stars shatter.

Just for a while, let me fly like a bird

into the eye of the hurricane without washing me out

like a cinder from seeing the world is a house on fire

lying on a funeral pyre of crutches carved

from the heartwood of a tree that blossoms beautifully

but never shakes the superflux down to drop

like a windfall at the feet of people who are hungry,

so there’s no way of knowing by their fruits who they are.

Sweet river, let me ride your scalloped waves

all the way to the sea like the pentatonic scales

of a black snake freaked with stars, uncoiling

like dark, soothing music from a syrinx releasing

the healing from the herb. Let’s exchange metaphors

like knowing smiles between the crazy and the wise.

My heart’s pitted by self-righteous meteors

that are always the first to throw stones at the earth

when they’re challenged to remember their own transgressions.

Let me taste the milk of human kindness

dripping like snowdrops of anti-venom

from the nightshift syringe of your other fang.

Isn’t that you shining like the caduceus of Draco

helically coiling like a stair well around the axis

of the windmill earth quixotically tilting at dragons?

Can you hear me like a muezzin calling himself to prayer

from the station of the last chakra above my prophetic skull

petitioning you to live up to the legend of your serpent fire?

I won’t forget the children are starving or neglect

to scatter their ashes like mourning doves on the wind

from a high precipice with a lordly view of the valley

like those two who died of scarlet fever a hundred years ago

I found buried under an oak tree overlooking the beaver marsh.

My heart’s breaking like frost-bitten twigs in an ice storm,

but I promise to thaw them out like kindling

and start a new fire in an oil drum for the cold and homeless

they can hold their fingers up to like a candelabra.

Show me the wild irises again and let me compare them

to the blue-white stars of the Pleiades. Let the tendrils

of the wandering grapevines take hold of me again

like the veins and arteries of an elated bloodstream.

Let me hear my own longing in the urns of the nightbird

and not try to reword its lyrics into something happy and untrue,

but add a few of my own like peace, wisdom and compassion

to share the sadness of being alone like the voice

of black walnut tree that didn’t make it through the winter,

crying out in the wilderness like an acephalic seer

without pretending, irreconcilably, that it doesn’t hurt.

I want to sit on this rock like the immutable foundation stone

of the vicarious world and not feel the rasp

of stars and sand waterboarding my throat

like an hourglass that’s making me hoarse with time,

calling out like a lifeboat with a leak in it to the drowned.

PATRICK WHITE