BANGING BINS AND HAMMERS UNBENDING
NAILS
Banging bins and hammers unbending
nails.
Morning in a small town. Chores,
chores, chores,
the self-interested business of the
world.
Wood and bread. Coffee and kids. Tooth
aches
and cabbies trying not to get caught
drinking on the job again. Car alarms
going off
in panicked parking spots. Blue
September sky
and bright sunshine clean as newly
laundered sheets.
Hillbilly hippies arguing over who
stole whose crop,
wearing their crystal laurels like the
root rot of the sixties.
I study the masonry of the orange brick
in a building across the street and
wonder
what it would look like glazed in
Babylonian
lapis lazuli. I feel like the
thirteenth inch
of a carpenter’s foot when the old
world
went metric. What am I the measure of
if not the freedom to observe the life
going on around me, with no discernible
purpose
in mind than the rain falling on the
roots
of dead flowers giving their ghosts up
to the wind?
Two bees working a late blooming Scotch
thistle,
eggs and butter, sunny side up, and
star clusters
of asters deepening their imperial
purple
like cochineal on the eyelids of junior
highschool girls
gaggling down the street to the greasy
Pizza Parlour
for a coke and a slice they eat like
torrid landscapes.
Deadly nightshade boiled out of
foul-smelling snails.
Wasn’t it ever so when witches
catwalk like models?
Brave bodies that ignore the Braille of
their goosebumps.
Even though it’s cold. The show must
go on.
Life insists. There’s a season to be
on stage
like a trooper on tour, and a time, as
most of us do
just to sit sublimely in the audience
and enjoy the view we’re ambivalently
happy
we never have to live through again
except as art.
Recollections in creative turmoil on
the run
from the chaos of killer bees that once
churned honey
in the hives of our hearts where the
mystery
of love and lust still presides over us
like a dark queen in winter after the
first snow.
How meaningfully irrelevant life can
delightfully seem
to a dog without a purpose that’s
slipped its chain
like a distinguished voice in a choir
of wolves
who feel the sadness of the full moon
is unspeakably deeper than the second
rising
of the blue that looks down upon the
threshed fields
and the few remaining flowers like the
paint rags
of an unachievable masterpiece that
failed brilliantly
to be apprenticed to its own solitude
as a kind of guess
at a good life that cleaned up its mess
before it left
like a traffic jam of Canada geese
rising
from a ruined cornfield candied by
frost and moonlight.
PATRICK WHITE
