IN A DRASTIC TOWN WHERE THE WATERWHEELS
HAD STOPPED
In a drastic town where the waterwheels
had stopped,
and the swallows sorted mail in the
fieldstone niches
of a dry birth canal, I gave my heart a
name,
The Burning Apple, The Unfeathered
Snake,
because there was no other bridge to
reach out to
and I didn’t drink, my pulse the
footfall
of a defeated bell of a man climbing
the stairs
to an attic apartment I didn’t trust
enough
to ask him what he thought about in
there
or was it all mirrors lying in state
for him
to undertake their burial like Horace’s
country villa.
Three hundred rooms. Roman modesty.
Imagine
the stars in your eyes you’d have to
short change
like a conversation you’re really not
involved in
to resilver the creaking floorboards of
your life
the worn rungs of your bones, in
moonlight
on the voices of the nightingales and
pastoral pillars of that.
From one aside to the next, a gateway
to nowhere
and then a fence, the people live as
they can,
enslaved by their own need to own
something
they can die in the service of like a
graveyard
in the greater scheme of events. I sat
at an open window
in the cool of the morning’s moodring
and admired how much
the saplings had flourished into
sprawling trees
that would soon be initiated into an
unkempt ceremony
of township chainsaws that would keep
them
from overreaching the powerlines
outside the drugstore.
OutZenning my Buddhist inclinations, I
killed
a mosquito that mistook me for a
bloodbank all night
on the shadow of the wire screen like a
partial eclipse,
thinking that nips the foodchain in the
bud. I’m either
a penumbral tyrant, or darker yet, a
great liberator
as I watched the lights come on in the
earliest restaurant
to greet the dawn, as willowy
waitresses young
as wet hair, roused themselves like dew
that’s been crying all night in a
dream of humid stars
to the jarring nightmare of the sun at
the door of their jobs.
Me and the cat, with no tribal rights
to the window,
chattering staccato under her breath
like a squirrel to constrain
the tension of wanting to kill the
unattainable pigeons,
their barrel rolls and flybys, without
giving herself away
like a secret lying in wait, a trigger
of fate, disciplined
as a straight razor in free flight, as
I numbly ruminated
on murdering worlds within worlds out
of necessity and spite,
wondering if the ghosts of the mad see
everything differently
when they’ve been clarified enough by
death, not
to get caught in the light of their
imageless exactitudes
or if life stays true to its word in
the tombs of their dead metaphors.
PATRICK WHITE
