HOME-THOUGHTS
Earth created lavishly here, spread
out,
a canvas gessoed with ice-ages of snow,
glacial cataracts covering the third
eye
that dreams in the seed underneath the
eyelid
of a pine-cone, tacky with fire, of a
mindscape
slashed and hacked out of thick paint
with trowels and knives and the
double-bladed
lumberjack axe that deforested the
moon. Quick,
violent gestures of life clinging in
the interlude
of great ages clashing like continental
ice-floes
grinding their teeth in their sleep off
the coasts
of an unsalvageable consciousness
crushed
like the masts of a matchstick flotilla
of lifeboats.
Dark ores of a dream brought to the
surface
for refinement from the underworld
of a jewellery box in the form of a
coffin,
everybody survives by not looking back
like a fox in retrograde hunting a
pheasant
that doesn’t cover its tracks in the
snow
in the wake of its feather dusting tail
under the ochre smudge of the winter
sun,
the yoke of a smashed egg at the foot
of a tree
where the birds return like bush pilots
every year to the shattered mirrors of
the lakes
like the sacred syllables of
unpronounceable native tongues,
the silence still vast enough to be
intruded upon
by engines and chainsaws snarling in
the wilderness
in an unholy ghost of blue fumes
infernally reeking
like motherless demons shadow dancing
around an angry campfire that scatters
the stars
like evangelists of greater
conflagrations yet to come.
We gouge and we wound. We die with the
sun
and revive like the wraiths of thin
atmospheres
that wail like the banshees of the
northern lights
outside the frozen windows feathered in
ice ferns
we look through darkly like albinos at
the moon.
Our cultural life has pink eye. Morning
here
is a bad fisherman that doesn’t take
its own advice
and heed the warning of how nice the
weather always is
whenever there’s a false dawn on the
horizon
sailing under the colours of another
country
that doesn’t take the black sail of
the night down
or shroud the dead they bury at sea in
the aniconic flags
that navigate by the starmaps of a
neighbouring galaxy.
In this arcane darkness you learn to
shine
by your own lights or you die in the
cold
like an asteroid belt of boundary
stones around
the firepit of the hearths and hardware
stores
you’re buried under like an avalanche
of prophetic skulls
that went out like a chimney fire of
daylilies
rooted in creosote, smothered in a
seance of smoke.
Human immensities dwarfed like the
afterthoughts
of inhospitable harmonies reconciling
the savage discord
of impersonal energies still shaping
the world
like turtle blood and starmud in the
abyss
of a cosmic medicine bag where the
waters of life
break like a northern river out of a
birth sac
that chews through its own umbilical
cord
like a leg hold trap beside of a rose
of blood on the snow.
Creation is always the first draft of
an inspiration
that’s never finished revising the
tree rings
in its heartwood as if the rain were
never sure
of the genre of things it was working
in
on a loose scaffolding of dead trees
uprooted
on a mountainslope better thatched by
snow
than water trying to walk across its
own land bridge.
Coming home from an alien space
like a prodigal exile from a foreign
land
is always like entering a new continent
where the large mammals of the
Pleistocene
haven’t disappeared yet, and you can
instinctually feel the lethal glee of
the moon
sword dancing with the sabres of a
crouching Smilodon
when you relinquish the comfortable
airport
of your arrivals and departures, and
cross
the dangerous threshold of your
homelessness
like a spiritual materialist with a
knack for survival,
tricks on how to live like a snow hare
in winter
that smokes the unprepared magician out
of the hat
like the cherry red stovepipe of a
Napoleon airtight
roaring like the ringmaster of a
mammoth hunt
in a surrealistic circus of extinct
species
that can trace their lifelines all the
way back
to the mountainous watersheds of the
Burgess Shale,
the Book of Life written in the
fossilized hieroglyphs
of starfish patched like the angelic
death’s-heads
emblazoned like coats of arms on the
Canadian Shield.
Tradition just a path someone broke in
the snow
like an offroad short cut through the
woods
that wasn’t expecting to be followed
by a cult
of snowshoes woven from the sinews of
wild deer
like dreamcatchers in a web of
empowering mandalas
that hang on every word you say like
the suspension bridges
of community support groups across the
Capilano River
of their vertiginous disbelief. We sway
like silk
in the heights of our ionized ideals,
aurorally,
and even when we don’t shed a lot of
light on
what’s real at the end of a long
winter, and what is not,
most people think we’re beautiful for
the way
we treat our apparitions like the
fair-minded history
written by the referees of the victors
too polite
to crow in the dawn like Chanticleer in
the windows
of another culture being exorcised by
the teaching nuns
of another genocidal day at native
school. The dominion
of Pandemonium where the fallen angels
settle
like big, wet kisses of early April
snowflakes
on the lips of the crocuses opening
like the mouths
of baby birds in the abandoned nests of
the great blue herons.
Goose-down and fur. We’re insulated
by the covers
of books that were bred for the purpose
on a fox farm of eternal flames to wrap
around our necks
and get us through the winter at the
expense
of someone else’s nakedness trembling
like a death sentence
in a purple passage of frozen poetic
prose.
The cold cuts like a Medusa head of
whips
biting you in the third eye of your
peripheral vision
like the thorns of something toxic that
wants,
not out of spite, but reflex, to lay
you out
like a comatose junkie shooting burnt
out comets
in a morgue full of falling stars and
flash in the pan meteors
you can wish upon with one hand on the
shoulder
of St. Peter, martyred upside down like
a foundation stone
upon which you can build a church or
cube the Kaaba
with a little dirt from outer space
washed out
of the god’s-eye of a hurricane of
razorblades
railing starclusters of cocaine up
their nose
like the C.P.R. in the nasal passages
of the Rocky Mountains.
There she blows like a narwhale in the
Arctic.
Burial huts of gangrenous crustaceans
in lobster pots
enflamed by the seaworthy dawn that
hauls them up
like stars caught in the net of Indra,
mark one jewel
and you mark them all, over the
gunwales
of a waning moonboat that will
disappear
like a bar of greasy soap left too long
in the water
before it reaches the zenith of its
swan dive
and goes the way of all snow like a
Martian ice-cap
on a globally warming bald spot in the
ozone.
Ancestral elephants carved in ivory
like the tusks
of a moon that never forgets, iced like
collateral damage
in the turf wars of multicultural
gangland glaciers
marking the limitless borders of where
everyone
came from in the first place like post
cards and passports
from the edge of dispossessed nowhere
stamped
by the monarchial wavelengths of a
bureaucratic blood oath
that approves of your living and dying
here
on the dark side of the moon, six
months of the year.
Fewer Canadians commit suicide than
Scandinavians
because of light deprivation. The
raccoons wear
outlaw masks to keep from going snow
blind
in semi-hibernation hiding out in the
time locked
cryonic vaults in the suspended
animation of a dream
where the only safe place is in a house
that’s burnt to the ground
when the birds are falling out of the
frigid air
in mid January like a Hitchcock movie
made
in Hollywood North that couldn’t keep
the medicine wheels of its own
spiritual flightfeathers up
let alone the lapwings of the alarmist
divas
in the immaculate choirs of shadowless
noon.
PATRICK WHITE
