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 pummelling 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  

IN THE FIRES OF LIFE

IN THE FIRES OF LIFE

In the fires of life stand up for the heresy of your humanity

as if there were no one else to burn for it, but you.

When you’re enveloped in the flames of an estranged loveletter

that embraced you like a flower that bloomed in fire

a long time ago, o how many afterlives has it been

since the hive had a dark queen to attend upon,

whether they honour your urn or spread your ashes

on an icy walkway for more pedestrian traffic,

don’t hitch your dragons to the death cart of a false dawn,

but ride the wind exhilarated as Icarus in your own updraft

like the errant flightpath of a firefly with a mind of its own

knowing there’s more insight in the sun that shines at midnight

than there is in the shadowless noon of a shallow enlightenment.

Listen to your heart as if it were real, not solid

and soon enough you’ll be able to hear with your eyes

what your ears can’t see that far beyond

the aerial perspective of the dark where parallel lines meet

to focus on burning another black hole in the sky

with the congruence of the intensity in the iris of your third eye.

Fire doesn’t burn fire, so you can shine lyrically like the earth

in the presence of your own star without being consumed.

How do I know this? I can taste the words life puts in my mouth

like a prophet in a fireproof furnace steeling the iron in my blood

like the growing edge of a sword tempered in my tears

that kills me back into lightyears of life every time I fall upon it

to save the face of some unknown tomorrow from debasing

the integrity of its sorrows by not hammering out the slag

of lesser stones than we draw the best Damascene swords from

as we do the sabres of the moon to the rhythm of a pulse

on the anvils of our percussive hearts forging fire-breathing dragons

shedding the darkest nights of our eyeless ores,

like a bunting of skin, a ribbon and windsock for the stars

that keep circling the north pole like the exoteric tree rings

of the lost art deep in our heartwood of calling down the lightning

like the roots of a seed embedded in our starmud, waking up

after a long sleep, like a pine-cone in the firestorm

of a germinating desire to live as immensely as possible.

While there’s time to grow the preludes and epilogues

of the next threshold we’re about to cross like refugees

over a bridge that spans the omnidirectional extremes

of our mindstreams getting on with their going

like waterclocks and aqueducts, or nightcreeks

whispering their lyrical way like the ode of a dark road

out of a grove of sacred aspens into a clearing brighter

than the light of the stars that pilot the orbs of the dung beetles

or shepherd dragons to graze on fire in higher pastures

than the world mountain could imagine in its wildest dreams.

Swept up in the fires of life, in this delirium

of inconceivable probabilities sleepwalking among the stars,

clarity isn’t so much a matter of burning your old tattoos off

like constellations that leave scars or cauterizing sunspots

like dangerous moles before they eclipse your immaculate wholeness

with the veils of isotopic ghost fleets raising sail in the bays of the north,

as it is in losing yourself in the picture-music of the lightshows

the mind puts on like an artist who isn’t looking for an alibi

to justify his eyes to what he sees without corrective lenses

like a starmap of fireflies without a fixed place in time and space.

In the fires of life you must be perfectly combustible

like the rainbow bodies of the wise men of Tibet, your eyes

inflammable as two lumps of coal in the skull of a snow man,

dead branches for arms, and your heart so generous

nothing left of it can be found like an ice cream cone

that’s fallen to the ground from the hands of a child for the ants,

and melted away into diverse forms of life that ensure

it doesn’t go to waste. We will all break bread in time

with the worms that shall nibble the crumbs of our dreams

from the corners of our eyes. Maggots overpunctuating

our mouths with too many commas and semi-colons,

necrophagoi editing our hearts and brains like turkey vultures

amending us like roadkill as if we were merely the first draft

of a poem ablaze and scattered with life as rapturous frogs in the rain.

PATRICK WHITE