FREEZING RAIN
Freezing rain. An incrementally
ordinary day
being cruel to spring like a bad mood
that doesn’t understand a teen-ager’s
energy.
Everyone’s retro-Blackhawks soaked
with slush.
Buds on the trees, but the blossoms
have taken
two steps back. Things as they are.
Your mind
as it is. Pigeons in the ashes of grey
miracles.
Yesterday’s mystery today’s history
of erosion.
A thousand years from now, will
somebody
try to imagine the way it was now as I
have so often
Shakespeare closing the door behind him
at the Montjoie’s on the corner of
Fleet Street
and Monkwell, thinking he might check
out the bookstalls
at St. Paul’s on his way to monitor
the receipts of the theatre?
Pride of London, Lady at the Gate,
Bouncing Bet,
did dandelions grow between the
cobblestones?
Though all the world’s a stage, and
we are such stuff,
as he says, dreams are made on, were
there days when the Globe
was a pebble in his shoe that vexed his
winged heels?
As many uneventful moments in an
eventful life
as there are blades of grass to
outnumber
the new recruits of the trees trying to
take a stand
in the water-logged fields at the edge
of town.
Old ladies breaking their hips when
they slip
and the school bus is grounded.
House-bound
on a farm out of reach of going
anywhere a glacier wouldn’t
with four ansy kids and the internet
down
until the power’s restored, is of no
less moment
in the history of the world than
Shakespeare’s lost years
as a clandestine tutor fond of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses.
The ordinary takes on the patina of the
extraordinary
in the middens of time. We’re
intrigued like mirrors
by the reflections of who we were any
day on earth,
once we disappear, strangers to
ourselves, as if Shakespeare
never had to bend down to tie a
shoelace, empty his boot,
or drool when he dreamt. Days like
today
with their utter lack of diffidence to
what was being written
in 1603 by a jobbing poet with cosmic
sensibilities.
Who knows who’ll will be in the minds
of those to come?
Maybe some die with an idea of who they
were,
putting a little too much emphasis on a
good guess,
but the memory of anyone’s always a
work in progress.
There’s always the afterbirth of life
after theatre
laughing and chattering after the
silence of the last act
leaving a funeral imposed upon their
affections
like tears of freezing rain, the shadow
of terror marring their pity.
Telomerase of frayed chromosomes, I’m
writing poems
on flypaper helically wheeling among
the stars
trying to make constellations out of
houseflies,
and I’m seeking a deeper intimacy
between words and my mind
as if all these labyrinths I keep
losing myself in
were no more off road from the path
that keeps taking me
through life, than my fingerprints are
from my skin.
Devoted to failing at achieving the
unattainable
as if it could be actualized as an
event of little significance,
I collaborate like a sacred clown in
the lonely absurdity
of my creative freedom to let things
make me up
as they flow along like the waterclock
of a narrative theme
as the curtain goes up like a veil of
freezing rain
to reveal the screening myth of a
character modelled
on my eyes, my heart, my feeling for
the part I’m playing
like a bucket the bottom’s fallen out
of like a deus ex machina
through a trap door ill-timed to make
an exit like Keats
with a awkward bow, having written my
name
like a tourist in water to see what it
feels like to drown
in your own lungs like a bubble of
blood rising
to the moment it disappears as if
nothing had happened at all.
Dreams aren’t solid, but even
unfulfilled, they’re real.
PATRICK WHITE
