THAT ANYBODY SHOULD KNOW

THAT ANYBODY SHOULD KNOW

That anybody should know. Do you really

think it enhances and expands their humanity?

Ring one bell, you hear a thousand different

songs, a thousand different funerals and weddings.

Listen to one nightbird. A thousand different

longings answer back like stars. One skull

like the new moon in the moist earth

or charred by the fire, consulted in earnest

and everyone’s life is either a burnt seed

that boiled in its own beginnings, or a pine cone

that opened its eyes like a tree in flames.

We glean the same garden. We celebrate

on the same wind-locked gate. Until

something opens us up like the night sky

and we fly away never to be seen again.

The air leaves no traces of what it tried to explain

in the chalkdust of the Milky Way.

So many stars to be lost among like ghosts

of what they were. Firewalkers that didn’t

make it to the end of themselves. And never

would. Roadkill by the side of the road

when they lay down like a corduroy forest

built on an old Indian path for the mail lady

when she travelled with a horse and buggy.

Her bones stick out of the earth when it thaws.

A beached old whale of a store, at one time,

now empty when we moved in, poets and painters,

with five acres, and a lake that came with it

and the place I wrote in, cold and desiccated

as new dry wall and the studio as big

as I could want it, but empty and alone

even with you there to compensate for the silence

for throwing the jam and eggs the neighbours

greeted us with all over the kitchen floor

it was impossible to walk on for a week

of black ice between us for reasons I forget.

Does it help anyone to remember that?

Is the evil that genetically modifies their soul

made any less ingenuous than a retired

hunting and fishing guide that’s always

on the look out for anything to drink

even when it’s smashed Polar Ice

in someone else’s Arctic Cat’s saddle-bag?

Voldemar the Latvian tailor alcoholic

would think it was cologne, a cheap buy,

with an ice storm of a chandelier,

powdered glass in it like the staff of life

as the sheriff heaped his furniture

out on the boulevard where everyone gawked.

And the landlord’s wife telling me I was

Satan as I painted wolves for a living

every Sunday night after she got off church

coming to the door, a hypocrite whore

later to be discovered by her angelic son

doing porn on the internet. Survival skills

in the topsoil of the clearcut fields

that wasn’t good for farming except for pheasants

grown and slaughtered and flown all around

the world. People lived on fishing permits

but shot deer out of season, the occasional

black bear. Everybody owned a gun

but me. I grew flowers only the bikers

ever stopped en masse to admire the colours

of the zinnias in contrast to the white Shasta daisies.

PATRICK WHITE

THINGS FREEZE IN TIME AND AWARENESS

THINGS FREEZE IN TIME AND AWARENESS

Things freeze in time and awareness

more often than they used to. I stare

blankly at the candle-holder and the easel

and there’s no waiting, no space

for conscious intervention of any kind.

No comfort from love affairs I’ve mined

for jewels in the ashes. Halos reforged

from horns as ploughshares are from swords.

An existentialist would call this lack

of mystery, bleakness, and there’s no doubt

only a few flowers remain to the fall,

but I’m alone with things as if

they weren’t trying to hold back the universe

from anyone who wants in on the secret.

Five a.m. It’s still dark out. There’s

a red glow in the sky. Until her boyfriend

with decorative cab lights on his truck

drops the young waitress off to open

The Hideaway across the street. He leaves

and she walks right into the darkness

unafraid not giving a second thought

to what might be lurking inside at this hour

as if she’d been making serious love

all night. She’s the first bird to come back

in the spring, though winter’s coming on,

and death lets go of Foster Street like a spell

I’ve been observing, stillness through

the window, the imperturbability of things

at rest while the town dreams beyond

its explanations for how life is for those

who watch without memory or preconception.

To be alive simply and cleanly, sixty-five,

watching the heritage lamp-posts cast

static shadows on the parking meters

that never move like sundials or bloom

like galaxies flaring up from wooden matches,

(I’m writing this after the fact, so this

is the history before it gets to you

like the light of star, or the pictogram

of the Pleiades, Perseus holding the Medusa’s

ghoulish head in red Algol) and know

like a leaf whenever there’s this much shedding

something is revealed even the darkness

couldn’t anticipate after all these lightyears

this dead end, the gateway to an unspeakable freedom.

Cut free, somehow, of many things that

gave up on me. Disproportionate to my humanity.

The overworked apprentice free to play

hookey for the rest of his life as if no one

cared whether he showed up for work or not,

to explore the world as it comes to him

and not be looking for anything in particular

in the blue boxes stuffed with startled cardboard

that doesn’t contain anything anymore

it can’t throw out at aeons and eras of notice.

To see the dawn in the dingy blue ripening

over the rooftops and greet the day like a ghost

that’s beat death to the grave like a bet I intend to collect.

PATRICK WHITE