FEEL LIKE A BIG RED ENAMEL BILLBOARD

FEEL LIKE A BIG RED ENAMEL BILLBOARD

Day 7: Little shakey this morning. I think it’s the meds

they’ve got me on. Corduroy road. Is that close to Tobacco?

And typos, swarms of them, blackflies

flying into my eyes and mind like cinders

and space capsules and moths in degenerating orbits

As I am. Caw, caw. Death’s firesticks.

I think I’ll make a kite out of them as long as I can.

Decamethsedone. if you say it fast enough

it convincingly sounds like a train coming your way.

This is the drug that sobers me up when

I firewalk to the other side of the moon, and this

is the drug that keeps me from throwing the last one up.

An angel who saved me from a month long Mafia of migraines.

But this tumour is acting like a competitive poet

in my brain who’s ferociously mad at me

for being the older, better published poet

and I am, at least for the next little while

or he bumps me off he can, and he can’t

and he never had to but he doesn’t know it

not just yet, that dawn is sometimes grey

as a religious order of cigarette butts, and that’s ok.

It can’t always be catacombs, urns and Auschwitz.

And I don’t mean that at all casually. I say it with respect.

Thank you. Thank-you so much for teaching me

what I’ve really never been able to quite as

convincingly learn from myself before

and this isn’t emotional baby oil I’m smearing

all over your heart like a mirror in the shape of your body

that was once the universe. I really mean it.

Or maybe you like the oil better. But either way

I’m trying to let nothing ever come between us

so I’m writing this right out in the open

where the lightning likes to play with arrows

from a war bonnet with Druids of mistle toe

like the streetlights on Douglas St. In Victoria.

God, a I miss that seagull now. That’s natural. And human.

Which is what I want to be with you, not

Heartbreak Hotel, or Hill or bone box at the end

of an equatorial meridian that once a year

kisses the skulls at the other end of the hall

on the forehead like a long shot with a cue ball

of prophetic skulls tucked in for the night. The kids

are all right. But if it’s got to be that, too,

you don’t need to steal the Buddha’s purse

to buy the buy the Buddha’s horse. I’ve got

a bag full of gold in my head that sings

like a waterbed of rattlesnakes that strike like a rose

when their aroused. I’ll be the voodoo doll.

I’ll take the fall for all of us. I used to jump

bareback mares up at Beaver Lake, holding on

by the waves of their manes for dear life as I am now.

Thanks for unbeaching my heart like a dolphin

that’s washed ashore out of a storm of torn fishing nets.

I’m blundering through a labyrinth of life and death

on the internet, and I used to meet each of you

coming down the other side of the road

like Buddha Pinnochio whose nose grew longer

with every truth he told, but now you walk beside me

like a blood and shadow travelling companion

to God knows where (Allaho Allahim) and I’m

grateful, o yes I am, I’m so grateful for the company.

Feel like a big red enamel billboard I painted

once for a pizzeria to advertise out on Highway 7,

two three quarter inch plywood sheets, sticky

hot paint that sweats, I leaned up against

the abandoned four car garage, spiders and tires

and wrenches and spanners I didn’t have a clue

how to use, rusty fans from Precambrian summers ago

and boxes of nails and screws, baby snake fangs

that have been collected over thousands of years

like poisonous punctuation marks, or gravegoods,

in an abandoned hippie organically abandoned farmhouse

that left a lot of pickled fiddleheads and Jerusalem

artichokes ready for a market they obviously

hadn’t made it to in Perth Saturday morning in the parking lot

where half of everybody who gathers there

gets real capitalistically muncipally unmerciful about selling

their wares off as if they were trying to tempt Jesus in the wilderness

and the other half just come to see the Middle Ages,

have a pageant of fun for a change, get out, put a little

colour on their face that doesn’t look like warpaint.

Jerusalem artichokes in bloom O they were beautiful

that hot red afternoon when I kept picking the dragonflies

out of the paint with the tip of a very slim painting knife

to trowel them out like tumors in a red, Burgess Shale,

Vietnam all over again but with a jeweller’s wings

this time, and solemn, yes, but does that black wall

have to look like it’s assuaging your guilt as if someone just

stuck a Scotch thistle under your saddle or

a whole constellation of them like a bouquet of Velcro burrs?

No slurs here, no slurs, please, and if I’ve desecrated

anybody’s feelings and they’re beginning to hear

the roar of savage indignation as the crowd rises

to its feet to savage somebody for being who they are,

well, it’s happened before. (Interjection. A mind spear.

I’ve finally figured out what all these little signs

on the page like little black, squirming, alphabetic maggots are,

and I don’t mean this in a mean way this time, are really all about.

Hoofprints. Cloppitity. Clop. With Siamese fighting fish in them

for a day, a day, a day of life I’m a rocking horse

who aspired to Pegasian elevations that would give

Icarus a nose bleed of mystic fire from a dragon’s mouth

that spared the butterfly by mythic comparison.

And Perseus still carrying that old decapitated head

of a snakepit around as if he’d been part of the French Revolution

or Verinus in serial Rome after his wife committed suicide

to prevent him from committing an honour killing

sporting some kind of new Parisian hair do

with his arm stuck out like a stop sign on a schoolbus

in his Christmas tree saddle, or is it a life line?

Please somebody, help, though I say this more

in expectation of what shall we say, accuracy and art?

That’s got a way with it. We’ll go with that. Accuracy and art

as long as I don’t have to paint it on a billboard

that sings like a gravestone. Who’s this? The sacred clown.

Or spotted tanagers at a ghost dance. This is too much fun

with words for the picture music going through my head right now

to believe it’s madness, and even if it is, it’s

liberating and hilarious in a heartless kind of way.

Some cheap surrealistic circus is in town with its crumby parade.

And I’m drifting oarless too far off shore to make

the continent of a point I was trying to drive across

less obvious than a cattle herd, heard. There. That was a rimshot.

Now let me tell you about the darkness I was

swallowed by like a humid, hot, brooding mouthful

of silence as if it were about to chew on me like a cashew word

with a millstone hung around its neck for good luck,

as if I’d ever let any kind of luck fool me now.

I watched Star Trek. Just to say it makes me feel

all warm and fuzzily nostalgic inside to go on playing

Jim Morrison anymore. Hamlet’s too affectionate

and I like Jim Morrison too much to hurt his feelings.

Blackness, the black dwarf, the black hole, the black matter,

shows up like a bead in transit for an unknown name of God on my rosary,

the one Qasem brought me all the way back from Kuwait

that gate country to God knows (allah ho allah him) where but the way

he so gently and slyly gave it to me still feels good

after all these lightyears I think I’m going to honour

it with an eclipse and a clip of Canada geese out of a Tom Thomson painting

after he stopped painting them with a geometry set

as if he were engineering a highway instead of a snake,

a rosary, or the river of life as it makes it way south

in the bodies of birds I’ve been comparing to urns lately

because I can have fun with the image turning it

in the light of an image I think I stole from Georgio once

but I’m not sure any more and it doesn’t matter anyway.

He’s a priest. And I’m not so sure about all of that.

I take an interest. And drink deeply and passionately

out of the skull cup as a sign of respect for my host

and I’m still wheeling like a universe of Sufis

at the crossroads of my little galaxy here trying to follow

the golden ratio like a sunflower as if it didn’t do very well

in math at school. And I did. But not well enough in my own estimation.

I haven’t been like the old woman Muhammad mentioned

unweaving a strong spinal cord into a million

feeble nervous systems as I keep repeating to myself

my head’s still in the stars as surely as my feet

are still planted on the ground, though I don’t want

anyone to take that quite literally just yet. When

a galaxy’s not ready to bloom, you don’t take a crowbar

to open it anymore than you do a flower or a woman or a child

or pet. Do you get the point? The nebula

tinctured by a moondog of medical grass will blow away

on its path to ignition and the Pleiades will do the rest.

Stars, stars, stars. What is it about them that since that first

night on my mother’s back porch trying to see them

through the Macmillan and Bloedel pulp smoke

that was killing all the flowers I had stolen for my mother

like geranium fire from the gods. O my good

Promethean son. God, how I’d love to hear that now.

That fifty-seven years later I still feel startled

in my heart, soul, mind, body, eyes, blood

tears, joys, terrors, mystic and otherwise, as if

the clouds just broke without meaning to on

the Queen of Heaven’s face and she lifted one

of her veils, though their was no return address

on the envelope, she smiled, I swear to God she did,

into my face as if she really meant it. And I’m not talking

about a flying saucer here I saw one night, She really meant it.

Back to the billboard. To break out of this trance

and be lovingly numb in a weird human kind of way

about emptying the ashtray like a Virgo indulging himself

with a little comfort order in his life he doesn’t have to feel

sorry about like a scar that’s more of a doctor

than the wound itself in a surgical theatre that

keeps whispering in my ear this isn’t like having your tonsils out

and it’s a long chaos between here and the garbage can

I bought to throw them in one easy swing of the arm

as if I were some sort of gazelle of a outfield catcher.

Caught it. Cancer. The crowd roars. Foul ball. I’m out.

And London bridge falls to the ground exhausted after

an extraordinary effort to hold itself up as long as it can

as a tragic clown with a heart as honest as he can make it

thinking that might make a difference somewhere sometime

for somebody else like an old blossom of a baseball cap

that somehow fits them just perfectly like a gift from a stranger

or the gods, if you want to make more of it than

it really deserves, it’s just a baseball cap, for God’s sake.

O, ya, that stupid billboard floating around in mind

like a raft I’m still carrying around on my head

gerrymandered out of these scraps of life lying around

from last winter when I made my penultimate attempt

to get to the other side of nowhere and everywhere in particular

but here. Which is the ultimate ride. When it makes itself

vertiginously clear I’m not here, nor are you, we never have been

and yet this dream’s been swirling around us like a river of stars

that had to get somewhere just the same. Five miles. Left at the next exit.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN HEAR THE SILENCE SCREAMING

I CAN HEAR THE SILENCE SCREAMING

I can hear the silence screaming. Space shriek

like a red-tailed hawk that’s just caught something

in midflight in a dark, starless, eyeless terrible night.

Talons. And a strawberry heart. How the stars

and the water eat themselves alive to stay alive

as long as they can, an urgent life boat with a plan

to make a sail out of a starmap and make port somehow

or even the coast of an island galaxy of consciousness

somewhere you can watch the smoke rise

from a fire too far away to answer like the snake road

of a melody line you’re teaching to dance

for your solitary amusement to counter act

your loneliness by imagining it doesn’t exist

by making everything take hands and dance, dance, dance

for rain in a dragon ghost dance in a pageant

of poetic calendars with scenic views of the moon

that scare you half to death they’re so eternally brief

and beautiful. Breathless, if the timing’s right.

And though I’ve argued with the clock my whole life long,

it’s never been wrong. Things happen when they should.

Don’t doubt it, the timing is immaculate. The planet

makes its transit, the stars break through the clouds

like seed germinating in the farrows of newly

ploughed starfields and the water birds come and go

like poets without reason on a waterclock of lakes.

I got to see that, and once like everything else

in existence is good for a lifetime of encores should

you ever want one like a postcard from the edge of nowhere

featuring the local flora and fauna. Beaver teeth and maple leaves

and wolves, wolves, wolves, forever to reassure the moon

somebody’s listening, and the valley has a voice coach

that’s going to help keep this all night one night one man

bandstand on the road to scare the ghosts away

with frying pans and kettle drums and prayer bowls

dialling a phone for an ambulance when the vigil ends.

If it ever really does. But that’s unconfirmable

at this subjunctive cross roads of what if what if what if

and the Sufis and the sundials have got their fingers

crossed behind their backs. Allah hu, Allah hu, Allah hu.

Love is nothing. Love is everything. Love is a beautiful

illusion that isn’t trying to get a point across as if

it ever had one to make in the first place. A scalpel of the heart,

with the heart of a jew’s harp cheese grater keyed out of old

unboiled, uncoiled guitar strings trying very hard

to be in tune with God, and the stars, and the music

of the celestial spheres weeping in the kilns of time

for the beauty in the tears of the tree rings of the rippling willows.

Eternal happenings. I remember the first time I saw

a pair of cardinals show up at my bird feeders in the snow

like two tubes of cadmium red outside my studio window

that could fly. And they did. Eventually fly away as

all things must. But they left me feeling I’d just had a visit

from the Vatican and it didn’t rust for once. And hasn’t since

or I wouldn’t have found a place for it like this in a deathsong

or more precisely, in a silo of a measure beside

in this medicine bag that hangs around my neck

all the way from Silver Lake to Smokin’ Eagles

in a labyrinth of backroads beyond the train tracks

on the high trestle bridge that looks like a hybrid

of a ladder and an aqueduct and a good place

to smash beer bottles on the rocks below as if

you were throwing fledglings and unwanted embryoes

off a peripetein ledge for genetic edification

and because you’re drunk and blundering and bored

and there are no more genies with train lanterns

swaying like bells at the side of the tracks

to wish upon anymore like falling stars and burning guitars

singing everybody’s national anthem in words

that were writ in lighter fluid by a phoenix with a broken heart.

Live up to any one of your poems just for once for one day

and a night in a patch of birches you like because

the way they let go of their leaves as if they were losing

their minds, but in a gentle shedding way

so every little waterguilding paddle of modest gold leaf

were enough for the moment, way more than enough

to squander yourself lavishly on the same budget

as life itself and live cooly and blissfully

like a blue moon in October among the locals

who know exactly when it’s time for the windfalls

to drop their heavy loads and take some time off

the graveyard midnight shift. What diff? As long

as the stars come out, and there’s always something

flying across the moon, whether it’s the urnbirds

of the Canada geese, or a passenger plane heading west

or an owl, or a bat, something you can’t identify, or a witch

as if you’ve ever come to understand what that word properly means

that makes you wonder if people up there

ever wonder if the people down here look up

as I have so often out in the woods, and wondered

who they are and where they’re going and where

we all come from and who gets left behind

to return back to the solitude of being

a human creature in the woods alone at night

wondering what it’s doing alive under the stars

and who moves on and on and on to the other side

of their eyelids to find it was nothing more nor less

than a return journey to their original perpetually

irretrievable innocence only with awareness this time

as if you’d finally found a way of watching the watchers

build their spider webs in space between two blades of stargrass

without anybody minding too much. As I haven’t minded

letting all the animals in the woods watch me paint

whatever they make of the way I work to celebrate them

over my shoulder as I’m walking away after a good day

of doing what I’m not still clear about, but do anyway

because it’s good to hand a flower to a star once in a while

in your mind. Make it a waterlily, deadly nightshade, or the black rose

of a burnt out galaxy that’s about to go supernova in symphony

with everyone with tintinnabulistic triangular enquiries

and say do you know what this is. Good heart health.

Even when you can hear the silence sceaming and space shriek.

Two birds and a lyre we’re all heading towards.

An arsenal of dreams toward a terminal cancer clinic ward.

A sword forged of silver Russian olives and moonlight,

an hour hand, not in surrender, but in tribute to the waters

that blooded it in the pulse of your heart for life and forever.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE'S A BLUE FLOWER IN ME AND A BLACK DOG ONCE

THERE’S A BLUE FLOWER IN ME AND A BLACK DOG ONCE

There’s a blue flower in me and a black dog once

that lived like a big, black hole in the heart in Sirius.

Darkness is an engine. Darkness is a root.

Who knows what’s going to jump out of the hat

the stump, the boot? The cosmology of your guitar.

Set it on fire. See if there are any galaxies in it.

What’s happening to the music in that hole

besides giving birth to the universe because

a spiny little fish with a life line with the back bone

to light it all up was given the risk to live once

with no idea of what was coming after it

and everyone’s been dogpaddling in curses and blessings

ever since waiting for their ship to come in.

It does, one way or the another it always makes port

but you’re the dock, the long wharf and the short walk

that disappears to the end of the plank and over without a blindfold

to be keel-hauled on the hull of the moon like scalpels and calderas,

goblets of bone and prophetic skulls no one’s had

the gall to drink from in millions of silent years

the rudder, the wheel, the emptiness of the lifeboat on the shipwreck

you’re sitting in feeling like some ghostly mode

of foghorn and moonlight swirling all around

like a shroud that’s never had a tattoo before,

or the forearm of an embroidered pillowcase,

as if it didn’t have anything else better to do

than mope around a smoke dance with wet heartwood

cedar boughs in a tin bucket trying to smoke

the bats out of the attic like cinders of chimney sparks

scattering the ashes of a dead sister in a rose garden

as if it were raining somewhere deep inside you

like a calendar of tree rings that had a miscarriage

it almost sounds as if someone is crying

for a mortal loss that’s irreparable as a simple

potted cup at a Japanese tea ceremony that’s been

broken and mended with gold. Things get better. So I’m told.

But that’s something you’re going to have to

figure out for yourself. Is the water hot? Is it cold?

Will you ever forgive the dark for taking hold of your soul

until the stars came out like eyes in the night

that have been looking at you all along like a bloodstream

in that hourglass of stars every night before you go to bed

in a comforter you’ve made a friend of

until the real lover arrives and everything is splendid

as the dawn in the morning or an artificial moonrise

in the shopping mall of a Hallmark greeting card

you send yourself once a month like a death threat

or a loveletter you leave unsigned because, because, because

you’re endless but you know that you’re really not.

And that scares you. Scares me, too. Now let me tell you

about this big, black dog I had once. I let him off his chain

like chromosome with red eyes who could see in the dark

like an emergency exit sign and he hasn’t ever come back since.

And I don’t blame him. I miss him. Which is a kind

of peculiar sickness of mine I’m growing overly fond of

like a dog collar that’s as open and empty as Corona Borealis

for a blind seeing eye dog of savage indignation

probably out somewhere chasing deer through the woods

as if he were dark matter making constellations out his grave goods.

I shudder. And then I think of it all as a happy event in the end.

PATRICK WHITE

O THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN, MISTRUSTED SACRIFICE

O THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN, MISTRUSTED SACRIFICE

O the women, the women, the women, mistrusted sacrifice,

who led me to the altar in a garland of stars

and left me to my own device to figure them out

which I never have. It would have been rude

to declare that kind of solitude resolved in your heart

and inside their urn and hourglass bodies

there’s a kiln of a firewomb and furnace weeping

like a window into God’s eyelids like a rose

with thorns they took out of a lion’s paws

as a simple act of mercy for that much wounded power

you couldn’t say in any other way if you weren’t

so rigidly contemporaneous, than flower, moon, claws.

Man is an abacus of prophetic skulls that have learned to count.

Woman is a rosary of infinite chakras and prayer bells

that plough the starfields when they’re melted down

into chandeliers and candelabra that have gone

witching for light as if there were a watershed of it nearby

or a housewell the grass has covered up like a veil

of green flames as if you just threw salt in the fire

that flared into a genie of apple boom and green leaves

then disappeared like an apparition nobody believes you saw once.

But you did. Like kleenex on the kitchen table

and the smear of red lipstick and the impression

of her lips as if she’d been kissing a bleeding snail

and then the darkness followed as she slipped

between the pages of the Burgess Shale like a loveletter

she decided by then not to send because it would be better that way

and you knew enough about women, at least

by the end, not to argue, but try to make a friend

as best you can. And watch how the river runs

your mindstream across your heart like a whetstone

that sharpens you up like a prophetic skull again

for what’s to come that there is to sing about

which is everything if you learn to sing it right to the end.

Tra la, tra la, tra la, like the live ones have forever sung

or whatever kind of kyrie eleison comes to mind

like water to your lips that tastes like distant rain

in a desert of stars she’s left you wandering in

as an adequate substitute for time when it grows sublime

fecundating the white mares of Libya in passing

like the north wind bringing the mail to Africa

like a million birds with a return address to what

she left behind her in a moment of sadness

when she looked into her heart and all the songbirds were uncaged.

Woman isn’t a sentiment. And man isn’t an adage.

But you’ve got to say it as if you crossed your heart

with a fire ax that a dragon set on fire like the house of life

in a crematorium that celebrates the great event

as if you really did live once and had a chance.

PATRICK WHITE