WISTFUL MELANCHOLY, UNFOCUSED HELL

WISTFUL MELANCHOLY, UNFOCUSED HELL

Wistful melancholy, unfocused hell. When

you get here, this hour upon you, this station

of ruinous freedom you longed for and attained,

extreme evanescence without the body for restraint,

nebular without any stars to show for it,

long past the beginning and too far to finish,

nothing to give up and even less to hang on to.

Everything you cherished and probably still do

enough to hurt you, keep suckering you back

into life as if you were being taught to walk

all over again by reaching out a few steps

further and further and further for what you want,

leaves you feeling undernourished, knowing

there’s no food for it you can eat with the same relish

you once tore at the flesh of an apricot

like the moon low on the horizon with your teeth.

The savage act of a mysterious, elusive life

that couldn’t be trivialized by an explanation

of its vital signs pulsing underground

as it lost interest in singing the dead up

from the grave when grief, even elegantly articulated,

fruitively matured into understanding how

it demeaned them by believing they weren’t

happy where they were, a windfall at the roots of it all.

Life shrugs. Things fall off your shoulder

like an avalanche of chips and bluebirds, angels

and demons who always had the better argument,

rank, identity, the world, a snowflake, the hair

of a woman you once loved so passionately

even then, when the dragon’s roar was fire,

you knew it would end with you feeling this way

one night like the long shadow of a bliss

that wouldn’t be bliss if it were to last

more like a watershed than a shotglass.

Still fall. Black walnuts rotting on the sidewalks

like bubbles of soot. The monarchs don’t sip

from the milkweed pods anymore, and that

stubborn little flower, chicory, just won’t give up,

however many times they bush hog the highway.

Stems detached from their leaves like

the slender bones of birds all over the sidewalk

as if they were talking to each other in an alphabet

no one’s deciphered yet. Violet asters against

the burning wings of Magian sumac when

the fire-god comes looking for fire in a shrine

devoted to its ashes. The autumn’s a sad furnace.

And me? Maybe it’s because my hair’s turned white

and the crow’s no longer dyed by shadows of moonlight,

I feel like a landscape smothered under the white noise

of wet snow. Not quite death but as close as you can go.

PATRICK WHITE

WITCHING THE SILENCE OVER THE CAULDRON OF THE TOWN

WITCHING THE SILENCE OVER THE CAULDRON OF THE TOWN

Witching the silence over the cauldron of the town

as the air conditioners shut down for the fall

and everybody feels something slushy

in their hearts like a bruised apple or

a rotten strawberry with unshaved stubble

or an exhumed moon whose fingernails

kept growing like a calendar of last crescents

after it was dead, as arthritic hour hands

reached out to cripple what they could not grasp.

He knows this madness well. Long, inbred

winter nights. Crazy farmers when the night’s

just right sowing the woods like the wind

from its seed bag, hanging on to the tail

of a black bull guiding them through the dark

like a new moon in early October before

the first frost freezes like a ghost to everything.

He lived up in Ardoch once and after two years

started to think like a rock. Hardness

made sense and the solid took precedence

over the real like a deer being bled

on a resurrected tv tower on a hill of skulls.

Recollected emotions like back hoes

and glaciers in tranquillity when the ground

he was standing on was too hard to bury the dead.

Smelt in the spring laid out before

eighty year old men with bibs on at the Last Supper.

Arctic cats in heat outside the lodge in winter.

He lived in a defunct hardware store in Fernleigh,

land of the bracken and the Shee, and sold wildlife paintings

to Pennsylvanians in the summer driving along

the 409 where Kashwakamak Drive meets the highway

and the cops parked to keep an eye

on the annual Outlaws’ three day pig roast.

The more surrealistic his life became

the more he understood magic realism.

He interfaced with the locals like a totem pole,

painting ferocious logos on the windshields

of their snowmobiles snarling like chainsaws.

He saw a black bear on its back, perfectly intact,

roadkill with rigor mortis, an overturned table,

an old fashioned bathtub with its legs and claws

sticking straight up in the air, desecrated

by its posture as the locals gathered to gawk

at something so powerful even in death

he was estranged by the darkness of the silence

that overtook him like an eclipse of the sun.

And the hydrolines strung out over the lake

the garden ran down to at the back of the store

hummed like spinal cords in the summer rain

like the staves of a musical snakepit thumbing a guitar

as Goldlilocks, the blonde minister’s daughter,

ran off with the bikers like an apostate religion.

He had a young wife with ingenuous breasts

as beautiful as a marijuana crop in the fall

to a rip off artist that plagiarized his macho

from comic books. Behind the deathmasks

fools wear to scare themselves into bullying

things they seek from the weak who won’t

speak up for themselves, is a crueler intelligence

alloyed like a sword with the lesser metal

of the inferiors its infernal power base is founded on.

He played Vulcan chess with a wolverine

who made sure none of the pawns on the board

took his queen for one of their own. He painted

six packs of wolves for the bandit pope of Fernleigh

who kept things impiously honest between them

and more than a bird bone flute fascinates

a king cobra, maintained a truce with a poetic mongoose

though you won’t find either listed in any guide

to the local flora and fauna. Nevertheless it’s wise

to be prepared for any contingency when

you’re out in the woods with a French easel

and a wife whose turn it is to be independently wrong

about the way the light falls on a dangerous face

wearing its character inside out like a police mugshot.

PATRICK WHITE