THE TOWN DEAD BY MIDNIGHT
The town dead by midnight, dark spring
rain on the streets
like puddles of anthracite, the cat
asleep in its feral innocence
and the furnace pipes cracking like
arthritic bones
and there’s a bleakness that’s
trying to speak for me
like a train whistle with a muse of its
own. Words
are trying to understand me like a
silence that sings
with a surrealistic accent in a stanza
of migratory water birds
excluded from the aubades and aviaries
of the dawn
because they don’t make cliches of
the lakes they return to
to swim among the stars like
constellations of themselves.
Sheltered from the adolescent temper of
the wind
in the tolerable loneliness of my
apartment, this bone-box
I write in the fair hand of a cursive
script of smoke,
of rivers flooding their banks
alluvially
with the emotional silts of a spring
run off
that lavishes me on the roots of
half-drowned trees,
I disembark like a lifeboat from a
Viking funeral ship
and let my mind drift into the depths
of an insignificant abyss
that’s never tasted the meaning in
the flavour of death
or cared that much for the black humour
of what I believe in
that labours at keeping me alive. If I
knew why it should
I could only be a disappointment to the
future
of my undiscovered solitude actualizing
its creative potential
to enter into occult marriages with
muses that sweep me off my feet
like stars and leaves off the
stairwells of my deciduous arrivals.
I don’t petition the gods or summon
the ghosts
of fires that burnt out yesterday like
votive daylilies
in the aniconic shrines of the sun to
return from the dead
and bless what I plead for as if I knew
what to ask
from my sorrow that might help tomorrow
rejoice
in what’s to come. Even wisdom
doesn’t question
the nature of the song that emerges
from the night
like a wild canary in a coal mine
urgent as a pilot light
that smells apocalyptic gas in the
subterranean labyrinths
of star-nosed moles blindly seeking to
get at the roots of things
that only bloom in the dark underworlds
of our radicalized starmud.
Bleak outside. Death, death, death in
the dead air
of artless cement and chronic pageant
of storefronts
like the repeating decimals of
unappealing floats
in a municipal parade of all we’ve
got to celebrate.
I don’t want to feel bleak inside,
sickened by the world,
but Walmart is dyeing its fashion
garments in the blood
of Bangladeshi girls skinned of their
lives
by corporate traplines and parasitic
politicians
baiting humans with 14 cents an hour
seven days a week
like those wasps that lay their eggs
like carnelian dots
on the foreheads of the living host to
let their young devour it
like future consumers of the western
world baptized
with brand names. Maybe I should
meditate upon a flower
like the one Buddha gave Ananda with a
knowing smile,
but all I see are white peonies freaked
with the hemoglobin of children.
In my time, people with clean hands
were usually the filthiest.
We were clever but we weren’t
encouraged to be real.
We stuck to the unprincipled
indifference of our social structures
like flypaper. We danced on the graves
of our fellow humans
and promoted a trickle down theory of
happiness like global warming.
Our weapons evolved like insects, but
the abstract savagery
and rabid rage that deployed them were
definitely
creationist, ante-diluvian,
conservative, and simian. Nothing’s changed
since the first prehensile grip threw a
bone ballistically
at the left front parietal lobe of
another ape whose ideas
mythically deflated its brain. In back
rooms
and sensorily deprived think tanks of
lobbyists and spin-doctors
we made window dressing of democracy in
the showcase windows
where we displayed the latest wardrobes
like the death shrouds
of the humans our gluttony had culled.
Misery polluted
the chandeliers of our crystal tears
like a hemorrhagic fever of acid rain,
but we went on ghost dancing with
ourselves as if things
would get better and better without
realizing we were already dead.
Evil in the world. If you care, how can
you not go mad?
If you don’t care, how can you not be
peacefully complicit
in what it is by virtue of a sin of
omission, forgetting
it will rush in like a backdraft of a
fire through your door one day
because nature abhors a vacuum and
paralysis and impotence
incite it like blood in the water, mice
in a snakepit?
Atrocities perpetrated in the name of
order are worse
than random accidents of chaos that
hold nothing personal
against us being here without necessity
or purpose
sussing out our feeble meanings for
life like garden snails
bull-vaulting our own horns trying not
to get gored on the moon
like a prehistoric aurex that went
extinct before we did.
I should leave all these catastrophes
behind me like
a graceful exit I made at the bend of
an awkward entrance
and walk out into the darkness beyond
this catwalk of streetlamps
posing like tungsten asphodels
observing a moment of silence
with their heads bowed like cobras into
the woods
down by the river but I’m loathe to
track myself in like roadkill.
I want to walk ankle-deep in the
starmud of the wolf paths
that will be thawing out this time of
year before the rain
has had a chance to pack them down
solid again or plump
the grass of the deerbeds. I just want
to see one star
shining through the burgeoning branches
in the burgundy crowns
of the birches putting their green
gowns on again like renewable virgins.
Beauty coming out of the darkness like
Spica in Virgo.
Trout lily, hepatica, wood sorrel,
violet and crocus,
I want to see what colours the spring
has on its palette this year.
I want to experience a pink full moon
soon to be eclipsed in Scorpio
and expand the difference that makes to
the way I understand things.
I want to know whose blood is
coagulated on the candelabra
of the staghorn sumac leaning out over
the river
like an old torch singer at a black
mass beginning
to get her voice back as she feathers
her reflection like a phoenix.
PATRICK WHITE
