MEDITATIONS IN A SNAKE PIT OF DISSONANT WAVELENGTHS

MEDITATIONS IN A SNAKE PIT OF DISSONANT WAVELENGTHS

Meditations in a snake pit of dissonant wavelengths.

An anti-Zen photo-op of enlightened dark energy.

Does a clean slate mean

there’s no starlight in the windows,

no fossils in the Burgess Shale,

no kings with any grave goods in any of these hills?

And I suppose I forgave you some time ago

but if I did

you’ll forgive me if I forgot.

Things have been intense over the past few years.

I’ve been living secretly underground like a nail

driven into the heartwood of an old growth forest

I don’t want them to cut down

whether it’s the tree on the moon

or Clayquot Sound.

Most people’s relationships

are mediocre books with purple passages.

Ours was a purple book with all the pictures torn out.

And that’s o.k. too, and that’s o.k. too,

and that’s o.k. too

I keep repeating like a mantra to myself

trying to zone out into a trance

that helps me feel as numb as a frozen gum

whenever I remember you in moonlight

with my eyes half shut

and my heart not as wide open as it used to be.

My eyes focus on a memory but it seems

they’re just seeing for show

and there’s no insight in it

neither they nor I want the courage to know.

And I guess it’s you I’m talking to here

or this simulacrum of what I remember of you

that’s kept on growing inside me

like a ghost that hasn’t made its peace with me yet

or maybe just this void I imagine

among billions of eyes

has yours in it too

and the way things are inchoately connected

somehow resonates vestigially

on the same wavelength you and I used to.

But even if nothing and no one are there anymore

that’s o.k., that’s o.k., that’s o.k., too.

I’m not going to break my teeth on a koan with a time-lock

I’m not going to give myself a concussion

knocking on a door from the inside

to get someone to open it and let me out.

The last time I did that

you were the storm that took me in again.

You were the third eye of the hurricane

and I was the star you washed out of it

because you couldn’t make it fit

that cocaine constellation

you liked to buff with fairy dust

before you took it to the streets

to find a black market for inspiration.

I was never desperate enough in those days

to keep up with you in your moodswings

so I tried to get behind you and push

your voice out onto a stage equal to your talent

and you wowed them. You did.

You had them standing up on the tables

and afraid to come out of the green room.

And I especially liked it when you dedicated

Walking in the Rain to me

and ever since I’ve listened to it

like a gnostic gospel I buried in the desert

to keep from using it like a sacred text to start a fire.

Hey, but two days later you turned from a hit

into an atomic albino Queen Cobra Apache-Aztec witch

with your fangs stuck like a wishbone

in the throat of your voice coach

for not singing as well as he listens

to what the lyrics of your raving hysterics meant

between the lines when you were coming down

like a junkie in a decaying orbit

that didn’t make it all the way to the moon.

Living with you then

once you got back on the blow

was like walking across a mine field

covered in blood-stained snow.

A black rose with the bite of a rattlesnake.

The thorns of a Yaqui mesquite cactus

like the tongue piercings of a prophetic skull

trying to make itself known

like a hidden secret in a savage language

written on flesh and bone.

Remember that night you slashed my sportsjacket

down the spine with one eagle-feathered swoop of the knife

for doing the dishes that had sat

growing green mould like alien life

in a junkyard of contaminated space parts

because you didn’t want to be taxed like a dealer

with the same chores as everyone else?

I liked painting all night at the kitchen table

with you watching me

like a kataba worm at the bottom of a bottle of tequila

wondering whether I was toxic to eat or not.

I painted you four by six foot love notes

on square-riggers of canvas that ran before the wind

like the skull and crossbones from the slower angel fleets

trying to regain command of their own lifeboats

to rescue our relationship.

But that’s o.k. that’s o.k., that’s o.k., too.

I’ve deepened my perspective

like a shipwreck on the moon

inundated by shadows below deck

with none of my water gates and fire walls in tact.

It took more light years traversing the void

without a point of origin or destination

to ever make me feel off course

because in any dimension

and every direction

one move was as good as another

before the cosmic mystery

dwindled into the mundane fact

of the aerial perspective I put behind me

when I painted time blue to keep it in the distance.

Just as I was happy you were gone with our son

like d.n.a. evidence

we did have something to say to each other once

before the house burned down with me in it

spitting into the ashes of a demonic failure

to immolate me at the stake of a familial heresy

while the birds were dropping in mid flight

at forty below outside.

I was far from a daycare father

but I hoisted him up on my shoulders in pride

as if the weight of the world were nothing

but the bubble of a laughing boy

goading an elephant with no sense of gravity

into a full gallop before he starts flapping his ears.

But that’s o.k., that’s o.k., that’s o.k. too.

If you walk it long enough alone

you’ll find there’s more dust on the road

than you’ve got tears to keep it down.

People might want to cling to your skin like cornerstones

and you might rather want to be keel-hauled on the moon

than wash your hands of them.

Sometimes the heart thinks it’s indelible.

The stars have fixed the tats for life

and all you’ve got to do is connect the dots

to see what constellations have been revealed

as signs of love’s misplaced centricity.

And then one day gone.

Just gone.

Who knows where?

There was a bubble, a gravitational eye,

A birthday balloon full of laughing gas,

a shepherd moon with an oceanic vision of life,

the impression of scarlet lipstick

like rose petals on a white kleenex

beside a make-up mirror

that managed your campaign of faces

like a drug cartel running for mayor of Shangrila.

Glacial ages of archival snowfall

sublimate like dry ice into thin air

like dreamers at their own exorcism

like the ghosts of wild swans

evaporating off the Rideau in the morning

without warning, one moment there, incredibly

the waterbirds, the light, the shapeshifting clouds,

the pudgy hands of a child

that hasn’t yet learned to make a fist

and the body of a woman with a taped wrist.

A fish jumps and disappears like a comet

back into a starmap of black holes

that plumbs the depths of your soul

from top to bottom

like skin-divers dragging the river

for the corpses of nightclub owners in Hull.

Forgiven, forgotten, foretold and fulfilled,

no more bones to make of it,

when you weren’t the blue lapis lazuli mask

of a jaguar goddess in heat

you prowled nocturnally like a smile

through shady emotions on the bestial floor

and you killed, not so much out of appetite

or to propitiate some ancient instinct in blood

but for the thrill of it, the rush, the ride

because you could, just because you could.

And no divinity was served.

You didn’t sleep with men.

You dragged them off into the bushes by their necks.

And that’s o.k., that’s o.k., that’s o.k. too.

The last time I saw you

you were draping yourself like an oilslick

over the shoulders of a bad movie

who was trying to man up among coke dealers

in a nightclub where people danced out of desperation

because everyone there had the lifespan

of a photo-op in the fast lane.

You wanted me to see

though I thought you overstated it a bit

how wonderful it was to be free of me

and spend the rest of your afterlife in theatre.

You couldn’t have been pleased

to see me with another woman

though I swear I didn’t know

you were going to be there.

I made a cold truce with the world’s brutality

and moved deep into the country

to mime the moonlight on the winter snow

where fate ran a cleaner casino than destiny.

At least the mouse knew

when it was being torn into pieces of Orphic meat

as the fragrance of hot blood steamed starward

it wasn’t being consumed by a coke rage

and the owl needed to eat.

A thousand re runs of that night

have tempted me to say something magnanimous

and make a gracious bow from the audience

as I headed for the emergency exit

knowing that was it for good between us

and what was left could only get worse.

Time is a stem cell in a shopping mall

that waits like a terrorist in all of us

outside an abortion clinic

for the right opportunity

to replicate the lack of heart

that just couldn’t go through with it.

Born in fire eventually

the salamander grows back its tail

to keep the phoenix intrigued

with the resurrection of its body parts.

No need to talk of a soul.

The fire-pits are full of bloodless abstractions

that burn without smoke or flame

like the jinn in the Koran

some good some bad

some grant wishes like new lamps for old

and some are weaving snakey emeralds

into the imageless wavelengths of their flying carpets

to tie up loose ends in their threadbare snake pits

by looking for live embers

in the ashes of a long firewalk

and more in the way of a Zen mondo

than a black mass in the way I put them out

to see more clearly what I’m stepping on in the dark

than I used to give a second thought to

and be able to say with genuine conviction

even if I do by some mistake

that’s o.k., that’s o.k., that’s o.k. too.

Namu amida butsu.

Given all I lived through with you

it’s easy for a retroactively enlightened man

to understand why you had to lie to stay true to your public.

You had the radioactive charisma

of a terrorist movie star up for an Oscar.

And I was the donkey you wanted to smuggle your amps in.

I may be slow, but I’m as thorough as a fuse-box

when it comes to snake charming circuit-breakers

so that the lights go out

long before the music’s over

and the real stars emerge from hiding

from the aftermath of your blazing

with google maps and cellphones.

There are darker intensities

and gentler lucidities

wired in parallel to the universe

like black matter to our synaptic neurons.

I snapped out of you like a lightning bolt

but it hurt to wake up from a coma and learn

you’d gone off like an i.e.d. after the big event.

Things that shine for themselves

like the light of a dream

chemiluminescent fish

in the sunless depths of the sea

or the T Tauri stars in the Pleiades

are better seen with the spotlight off than on.

And I don’t know why.

Maybe you suffered from stagefright

and overacted

but you always killed the messenger

by sending a lighthouse

to do the job of a firefly

when a blasting cap in a beaver dam

would have done the same collateral damage.

But that’s o.k., that’s o.k., that’s o.k. too.

Two fools saw their names in light.

The bright one reached up for stardom.

The dark one looked down for insight.

The donkey looks into the well.

The well looks back at the donkey.

And things just go off by themselves.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MAGI OF CRAZY WISDOM

THE MAGI OF CRAZY WISDOM

The magi of crazy wisdom have delivered their gifts and separated to find their long disappointed ways back home as if it were any less amazing the star of Bethlehem in the house of bread turned out to be a supernova recorded by the Chinese or as close an approach the shepherd moons of Jupiter are ever going to get to a manger that would lead them to green pastures on high ground. Even if it didn’t before the first snowfall. A Palestinian 747 pilot for Japan airways once gave me a young ram for my birthday right out of the Koran or the Bible, and I called him Harouf Tajeen which is Arabic for Curried Lamb. I lived on a sheep farm that had gone broke because the coyotes mauled the flocks. A savage sacrifice in a rough school where hardly anything ever knocks and no one ever really graduates until they drop out. From a lamb to a butt-kicking rodeo clown of a ram I cradled Harouf in my arms like a prophet from the Old Testament or Jim Morrison in concert and instead of counting sheep I’d recite him the twenty-third psalm to get him to sleep with the dogs by the fire on extremely cold nights in the winter. And just to see him always made me feel kind of laughably holy as if my demonic gods had a divine sense of humour. Maybe holy isn’t the right word. Less damned would please a Zen master more. So less damned then, though I don’t mean that in a Byronic sense, but more in the way of being called upon to show respect for someone else’s colours though they don’t mean that much to you except as a source of danger. And here was the living word. Not the dead symbol. I could pluck the burdock out of his fleece as if I were reinventing velcro. And the dogs and I slept lightly at night with one ear cocked and our trigger finger on the crescent moon to run the coyotes off God’s little acre. We weren’t of Eden. But we were in it up to our jugulars. We were the black ops watchdogs of the Holy Land, and though my ram could, we weren’t allowed to enter the promised land armed with blood on our hands. Same god. Wrong sacrifice. Nature red in tooth and claw we were the bloods in the hoods and illegal settlements of Los Angeles and East Jerusalem. We were the Knights Templar of the pioneering communities that were settled here by temptation in the wilderness where they recorded the names of the wildlife that persisted in persecuting them like coyotes and wolves and bear and fishers in the Book of Heresies they were fond of quoting like the devil knows scripture at their revivalist prayer meetings to lift this heavy trapline off their shoulders and lay it upon another like a scourge of predators they couldn’t convert to vegetarianism. Think of the rabbits that would die for the lack of a carrot and the donkeys that wouldn’t have anything to look forward to if everyone gave up eating meat. And what was God’s original design for a trapline if not a wolf? Case closed like a koan with a crack. And it didn’t matter anyway if we shone with a deflected divinity while the angels were looking the other way distracted by the ricochets in the voice of God. We were the dragons and skeletal armies that guarded the Golden Fleece like the condottieri of late medieval Florence and the contractors of modern Iraq. But we weren’t the kind of cartel that would hold a sacrifice for ransom like a judas-goat. We’d do that for free just to prove we weren’t all mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Hells Angels sometimes stop to help people change flat tires. Farmyard dogs that have been crazed by the moon once too often after the porch lights go off sometimes look out for a member of a gullible species that they might otherwise prey upon. Who knows, maybe it was a vestigial hunting ritual to celebrate our symbolic gratitude for the generosity of what we killed to live? But we forbore until the score was Rams: one, Coyotes: none. And then the inconceivable happened like an anti-miracle drug. Harouf ate deadly nightshade and died. At least that’s what the neighbours told me it was. I had to rent a back hoe to keep the coyotes from digging him up. Put heavy stones on his grave. Said something soft and brave and open-ended about what a good ram he was. And how sorry I was we couldn’t save him from himself. And what did me and the dogs learn from all this to advance our spiritual enlightenment even so much as a shadow of what it’s supposed to be? Never run to the defence of a suicide on its way to a sacrifice without letting nature takes its course. That might sound callous. But weeping like broken-hearted blisters is worse. Sometimes the mountain just falls off the climber no matter how many sherpas he has around him to guide him up out of the valley of death one fragile foothold after another all the way up the goat path to the top of nothing with wolves to cover his ass, and when the moon asks about the horned one, mourn his passing.

PATRICK WHITE

JUST WANT TO WRITE

JUST WANT TO WRITE

Just want to write. Just want to paint. Just want to eat and drink and sleep and defecate and dream and meet the occasional woman who can turn my crank. Just want to drift like blue smoke from a distant fire on an autumn hillside off into the distance like the human smell of time. Don’t want to worry about publishing or selling, just want to walk by myself through the high starfields wondering what to call the flowers. Let things make me up as they go. I don’t care what kind of spin they put on it. Just want to blow gusts of stars in the eyes of the dandelions. Want to beat things like bushes and stumps with an old crooked stick and not have to care what jumps out. I want to be startled by quail and not suffer a heart attack. I want to be alarmed by the four-stroke Harley engine of a wild partridge revving up to explode in my face, and not have anything to be frightened of. You hear me out there? You hear me, you prophetic skulls of my poetic ancestors? I just want to kick dirt down a long country road late at night and feel the wonder and eeriness of being alive to ask myself what the fuck I’m doing here trying to put down roots in a tent city. And you, if any, who overlook the wanderings and circuitous blossomings of the poets who have trued your heretical madness into riverine sponsors of life they had to give up their own direction of prayer to live. Instead of buying property along the highway. Just let go of my spine awhile and let me feel what’s it’s like when a kite’s as free as a waterbird to land where it wants on any one of ten thousand lakes that can still remember the original taste of the moon. Let me stand like an abandoned farmhouse somewhere and try to see eyebrow to eyebrow through the eyes and the windows of those who once lived here long enough to leave a wild orchard and a couple of kids in the ground to carry on without them. I want to weep like a November windowpane for the cruel sorrows that embittered them. I want to stack field stones into Great Barrier Reefs encyclopedic with life and not on top of freshly dug graves with the few words of a twitter account to say what the children died of. I want to take all the scarlet letters, the scarlet fevers, the scarlet tunics, the scarlet pimpernels and boil them all down into a dye I can slash across the sky like a sabre of cadmium red in a wet summer sunset. O you who preside over my origins like the executors of my afterlife, leave me alone with my metaphors to follow wherever it may lead the spoor of mythical beasts that have never experienced what it’s like to be helicoptered out of extinction by a dragonfly playing stork to a black rhino. I need space. I need enlargement. I need time itself to just hang around like a bed sheet pegged to a clothesline between two polarities of life, one, deciduous, and the other, evergreen, so when I take it down again like a membrane of M-theory, I don’t have to shake the smell of the wind and the sun out of it. Enough of good reasons like sensible shoes with arch supports trying to indoctrinate my irrational creative motives for wearing black cowboy boots without spurs. I want to reconfigure my fireflies into more original constellations adapted to the imaginations of wolves and Canada geese rather than shepherds awake all night guarding their sheep from the coyotes that have been driving them off the farms around here for the last century and a half. And even if nothing is improved advanced or progressed, no contribution made to anything, no purpose served, no function discerned, I want to go sit by the skeleton of the white-tailed buck that bled out with a hunter’s bullet in its flank, by itself, just itself dying, being death, the whole of death, no part left out, as if nothing in that animal’s entire life had ever happened to it from the outside. And this so alone, while the frogs and the damselflies and the boat-tailed grackles went about their business as if nothing ever happened of any consequence, even the death of large mammal. I want to return to the secret I’ve kept all to myself all these years, and listen to those bones whisper to me again that learning how to live fully is no different than learning how to die into life abundantly. I want to see the wild columbine and plush green moss growing through its ribs and the wild grape vines coiling up its horns. I want to go talk to the shaman in a trance of dancing totems and feel his old presence empower me and the deer to understand one another as if we were both collaborating in each other’s silence and solitude. And even that’s saying a little too much.

Just want to write. Just want to paint. Just want to go stargazing late at night up on Heartbreak Hill and think of all those women I fought the Last Duel in the Heatscore Hotel over without a second to die in the arms of. And wonder whose honour it was I lived as if it were worthy of dying for. And why no one’s ever come back to put flowers on my grave. And if the theme bores me like a road that’s sticking to its narrative, don’t want to justify anything to anyone least of all myself, if I wander off the beaten path like a man who doesn’t have to answer to anyone, happy to be lost if he’s lost to himself. Just want to look at the moon in peace and see the tree the Japanese see, or the medicine woman of the Algonquin healing their wounded canoes with wild rice. Don’t want to be nice, or brave, or emphatically sincere. Want to sit on a rock, my chin on my knees, surrounded by waterlilies at moonrise and think of a woman with similar skin emerging from the ghost light and kissing me on the forehead tenderly, say like Sedna, the caribou mother of the Inuit, you can trust the universe completely even when someone who loved you like the best yesterday she ever had on earth, leaves a suicide note on the mirror, as if sorrow had no tomorrow and joy had the rest of her death ahead of it. I want to reassure myself in the crisp coniferous atmosphere of the dolorous pines standing on a pyre of rusty eyelashes and confiscated compass needles, there are some questions that earn a living complicity, and others that go begging door to door for answers. I want to feel the exquisite eloquence of her absence turning like a knife into a skeleton key in my heart that might unlock it. I want to know if the shallowness of her victory over death were worth the depth of its defeat. Or maybe it was a truce, a stalemate, suspended animation, a lapwing to draw death away from something she cherished more than the hurt she nursed as a distraction from a greater pain. Like I said, chin on my knees, like the dolmen of a thinking man who knows his sadness would not be alleviated by the answers anymore than a wound is cured by carbon-dating the arrowhead that made it. Mournful the loons. Baleful ululations reverberating across the lake like Arabic women grieving the dead with their tongues. Her absence lives in me like the mystery of an empty room in a palatial universe I never enter out of respect for who isn’t there. And all I want her to do, if she can do anything to make a difference to the way she left me to explain, is not come back the way she came. O you who have used me like a medium for years in a conversation of voices that didn’t involve me to whisper into your own ear as if you were talking to the dead, leave a message, and let me return to my native tongue without being summoned by anyone who doesn’t know how to read or speak for themselves, on this, or the far side of any other river whether it flows out of Eden, or procrastinates in the roadside ditches of hell boiling with thermophilic life. Let the glaciers pass over me as they did this landscape twenty thousand years ago and leave me as they did these lake beds in their wake ready to receive the rain like billions of tears from everywhere and everyone until all that grief is quickened into life by our eyes. Just want to write. Just want to paint. Don’t want to hold a mirror up to nature wrong-side up. Don’t want to care if I do. Don’t want to take a guided bus tour through the famous flashbacks of a bad acid trip that even the sixties wouldn’t do. Just want to sit somewhere on the trunk of a fallen birch sodden as salmon, chin on my knees, beside a deer’s skeleton, waiting for the next rainbow trout to jump like my heartbeat. And watch the ripples raise their eyebrows in amazement.

PATRICK WHITE

SITTING IN THE DARK

SITTING IN THE DARK

Sitting in the dark

being who I am by acclamation.

The solitude half memory, half exorcism.

No one else ran for the position

so I’ve settled on trying to live up empathetically

to this person that’s tried for so long to be me.

The sound of the occasional car on Highway 7

six blocks away

puts its hand over its mouth.

Everything’s a secret at this time of the night.

And it occurs to me

I’ve always been a stranger to myself.

The enigma in the doorway across the street.

My windows. My keys. My locks.

But always looking up at my own place

as if someone else lived there instead of me.

A man with no return address on his homelessness.

As if I were always catching a glimpse of myself

going around the next corner

and I’m the tail I’m trying to lose.

Or giving the occasional mirror

caught totally off guard

cold chills in passing

like a ghost with unknown enterprises of its own.

My freedom enclosed

within the sum of its limits

I live in an elsewhere zone

where the mystery of what I’m doing here

goes to extremes

like a tent city outside

the vacancy of an unoccupied metropolis

of anti-social landlords

to prove I have a right

to the portable threshold of my homelessness.

I’m beached like a birch bark canoe

that isn’t going anywhere

on the shoals of my stream of consciousness

trying to figure out who’s doing the saying

and who’s doing the listening.

Though most people think

one is the spitting image of the other’s reflection

verbal expression is not thought

and you can’t hear it before you say it.

Even too late for the drunks to be out

I like the way the half-hearted moonlight

interprets my face through its fingertips

as if I were having my portrait done in Braille.

What could that look like

when you’ve connected all the dots

if not an eclipse or a new moon?

Take your pick.

And I may be somewhat out of touch

with how dark things have become

but I know this much

this much at least I know.

Worse than despair

is learning how not to care.

I mean what have you got left

when all’s been said and done and gone

if not for a few old reflexive delusions

in a holy war of tribal mirages

that have made a habit of your heart

just as drugs become the cosmology of junkies.

It’s no more absurd

to be left standing like an echo in a doorway

long after the house has been torn down

than it is to paint realistic watercolours in the rain

en plein air.

I thought I had a message once

worthy of descending doves.

I could feel the wind under the dragon’s wings

open like the firedoor to a furnace full of prophets.

And the words were mine true enough

until I realized how much life like art

is totally plagiarized from the medium it creates in

and how imperative it was

to be reborn from your mother-tongue

like a whole new language of evolving memes

if you want to be taken at your word

even in hell as in heaven

you know how to speak for yourself

without resorting to paracletes

even when you’re persuasively certain

no one can understand you.

Every word might contain a dead metaphor

but when mine aren’t demonically possessed

and speaking in tongues

they’re buzzing around the azaleas

like hummingbirds and bees

sipping black kool-aid in Jonestown.

I start out writing like a new moon

but by the time it’s done with me

I’m a total eclipse in an ink pot,

indelibly.

That’s why I’m sitting here in the dark

trying not to adulterate the light

with cosmic thoughts of all night streetlamps

in an empty parking lot

where everyone overpays a price

for their little square of time and space.

I’ve got a digital alarm clock

with three and a half numbers that glow in the dark

like an informant trying to warn me

before it’s way too late for all of us

to adjust my time-zone and dial it back.

To when?

To when it was a better world?

To when I was a better man?

To the last chance I had to become one?

PATRICK WHITE

TRY A LITTLE HUMOUR I SAID TO MYSELF

TRY A LITTLE HUMOUR I SAID TO MYSELF

Try a little humour I said to myself

as I held a Baretta up to my temple

to blast my way like the C.P.R.

through a tunnel in a mountain

to the seaward side of Hell’s Gate.

I tried to keep it light as a can of American beer

but beer to a Canadian poet

goes a lot deeper than that.

It isn’t a career it’s fate

and there’s nothing you can do about it

except try to engineer your suicide

like the Little Train That Couldn’t

to make it look as if you were laying track line by line

across a waterbed of four thousand square miles of muskeg

when you fell through a crack in the social net

like a childhood event in the life of Icarus

that keeps you from getting up off the ground

even at twenty-five below in a snow bank

drunk out of your mind

like some Canuck Dionysiac

dumbed down by his revels

after the Eleusinian mysteries of the sacred bars close early.

Revelation arrives here

like the memory of the night before

to a hangover that just can’t believe it.

The prophets of delayed insight

like the lag time on a star

see things in black and white

and hide in the bellies of killer whales

dressed like logos

protesting through their blow holes

the desecration of the seal hunt

haemorrhaging like ice-floes

in the ruthless gloaming

of the land of the midnight sun.

Imagine living in a mindscape

where you can’t dig wells or graves

half the year round

because the ground is as hard as an Irish nun.

And who needs rockets to get to the moon

when we rise per ardua per astra

through bolts and bars to the stars?

We reach cruising altitude

through a long runway

of dams and canals and locks

that elevate us slowly

like salmon swimming up stream

against the flow of time

like mystic beaver waterclocks

to enlightened extremes of undisciplined bliss

just before we die.

Fanatics of fair-mindedness

that balance life with death

by giving each its turn

to put an end to the argument

by seconding the suicides

of the winners and losers

in Last Duel Park

to make it a fair fight.

I’ve lived sixty-three years here.

I was born here

in the salmon-fishing capital of the world.

Campbell River, British Columbia.

And I still feel

like a political exile

who’s just taken sanctuary

on the grounds of the Canadian embassy

somewhere in my home and native land.

Here in Perth, Ontario,

out in the sticks

you belong to an extended tribal family.

Closer to town,

a distinguished blood line

of imperial ancestors

rooted five generations back

overly posed in sepia-tinged daguerreotypes

that look like they were painted in nicotine stains

against a backdrop of white with liver spots

and placed in funereal frames

to form a long scornful gauntlet

of moral opprobrium

down the long echoing halls

of the municipal mausoleum

where I go to buy my garbage-tags.

And where are the women

who gave birth to these stalworthies

of pride and place and privilege

in an imported milieu of cultured hypocrisy?

Were none worthy

of staring back at me disapprovingly

or were their hearts so big and compassionate,

their wombs so generous,

the ones who didn’t expire like daylilies

had to go so native to survive

they weren’t worthy of mention.?

Anyway, point is.

On any average day in Canada

since I was born

in the pantry of the world

I’ve felt like an endless Thanksgiving

I spend with myself.

My hospitable passport

a welcome mat I can drop

in front of any threshold in the world,

a screening myth for what was done

to the natives around here.

Maybe that’s why I feel

more homeless at home

than I do on the road.

I’m not staying long enough

to push the host out of his own house.

Good spiritual manners

and I’m a mannerly Canadian

are as much about timing as content.

Space may define the body of my country,

but it’s soul is time

measured in mountains and glaciers

and vast seabeds of prehistoric oceans

in lakes big enough to be the vital organs

of an entire continent

and stars so ferociously bright

in the absolute night air of mid-winter

they’d burn holes in anybody’s flag

like cluster-bombs of white phosphorus

were someone to try and naturalize them.

When you’re living in a country this size

it’s inevitable that you’re going to feel

like a small person forced to do big things

just to survive.

PATRICK WHITE

WHY DO YOU ALWAYS COME BROKEN TO ME?

WHY DO YOU ALWAYS COME BROKEN TO ME?

Why do you always come broken to me? Why do you never come whole and full of heart? I can barely remember the person you wanted to save from yourself. I recall the inspiration you were once to everyone around you, but who are these anti-muses of Logoland you keep wearing around me when we both know because we’ve been there, there are no phases on the dark side of the moon you can put on and take off to mask your faceless emotions. Most people only need three to get them through the rest of their lives, but you were Queen Honeybone, and you needed hives to house yours. And that was okay when things were sweet and every wildflower in the starfields prophesied in its sleep that no eclipse would threaten the honey again tomorrow. You were the black rose back then who wore too much make-up on your eyelids, because it was more important to you, as it still is, that more people saw them than you saw people through them. If you were too much of a sleaze-bag to call it lust, you called it love in those years to take the danger out of it and bind hot blood to you on principle, but when I first met you, I didn’t see a lot of chain marks on your skin, but when I looked in your eyes, I could see a lot of lost keys to an abandoned paradise you didn’t know what to do with. You were a knock-out, it’s true, as cruel and sexy as a winning hand in strip poker, and no one knew how it happened, but you were always the one that ended up with brain damage. I remember that back alley drugstore you used to carry in your purse, and that tiny emergency room behind your secret zipper where your dirty syringe was bagged like a snake in its own coils. And how, whenever I got into bed with you on those bad starless nights in the Glebe, when the snowbanks soaked up the blood of the barfights and the light of the streetlamps like tampons, and we tried to fuck ourselves to death out of desperation, I always felt I was making love to you in the back of an ambulance screaming to get to its own accident as fast as it can. You told me once how cool you thought it was to be the last militant suicide to jump from the Peace Tower. And then they put up the butterfly nets. And you took it as a personal insult. I got caught like a polar bear on an ice-floe in more snowstorms of coke with you that most Inuit have survived a blizzard. Long nights with our backs up against the wall in sparsely furnished studio living rooms that looked that way for real because to live the way we did meant you were only passing through. Brooding candles and mystically bruised bottles of dark wine. I once defined a mediocre poet as someone who was looking for a home, and a great one, as someone who knew he wasn’t going to find it. And you inferred from that you had to be a genius. And given what I wanted from you that night we discussed poetry like an occult science in the Kabbalistic candlelight of Third Avenue, who was I to argue? And though I wouldn’t say it then because I hadn’t died enough yet to know the difference, looking at you now, I am reluctantly repelled enough by your twisted strategies to coax my wavelength into being just another one of those loose threads in your flying carpet to tragically agree. You’ve gone way beyond me into hyperspace like a multiverse blowing bubbles like the spheres of expanding mirrors in a time warp. But it’s your tail, not mine, you’ve got in your mouth like the gaping zero that always let’s you know what time it is in infinity. Forever always comes back to the specious present of here and now as if it had never left in the first place. You can wear a lot of thresholds out on a back country road when you don’t know where you’re going at night, and I didn’t for light years after you left your Schick Lady’s Razor uncharged on the sink. I should have known by the way you put your lipstick on like revenge in that tiny squinting mirror on a spider mount you ripped off my telescope, it was time to turn off the music and close the doors of perception. Good night, my friends, good night. May you bear my absence as lightly as I do yours. It’s profoundly Keatsian to make a gracious bow to the mail man before you jump from paradise without a parachute or a star map’s permission to land without consulting the tower. I wanted to avoid a holy war between your angular stars and my celestial spheres, but you were never in the mood to be wrong and I was always out of white flags I could hang from the window like tragic bedsheets.

You had a band. Queen Honeybone and the Drones, and then you had the drummer. And that was that. I gave you back your black snake blues bass guitar like a total eclipse of the moon and decided I had better things to do with my bodily fluids that turn them into tears and spit on the stars you once walked on like a lead singer belting out revolutionary cliches of social behaviour you were the worst example of. So love went to work for the post office like fan mail and I headed deep into the country like a wounded wolf to look for herbal cures to urban maladies. I would occasionally remember you in the morning when I was listening to the honey bees humming in the locust trees powdered with pollen trying not to impale themselves on its Draconian thorns. And I’d write poetry on the flakey picnic table that drove slivers through my wrist like relics of the true cross that wanted to see me bleed from my stigmata to prove this was my real afterlife. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. And I lived for years like a witchdoctor in paradise with six thousand stars overhead visible to the naked eye against a darkness as thick and rich as Turkish coffee that turned Medusas into hookahs. And I saw how gently, everywhere I looked, whether at the ants orbiting the muskrat’s skull like tiny black satellites constantly making course corrections, or groping in the dark without a flashlight for the fuse-boxes of the fireflies in a black-out that came like a revelation of how fragile we all were, I saw how gently death carried the brides of life across the threshold and let them go again in the spring like wild grapevines and deadly night shade. By then I was enough of a herbalist to know the difference between a maenad and a witch. A good drunk and a bad acid trip. Though there was always something dangerously seductive about that hourglass tatoo on your ankle. And the way anyone who didn’t know when they were making love to you that timing was as important as content, disappeared by morning when you woke up like a cannibal that had gratified her sexual appetite. Sex might be food. Desert before dinner. But it bites when it comes down to who’s going to eat whose vegetables. And you were always the one with the inexhaustible golden spoon around your neck. Remember the Chimo Inn when I hung your bag of blow over the toilet like the sword of Damocles and asked you to choose it or me? And you hesitated. You lost control in the moment. You saw your reflection on my silver shield and you turned to stone. You shattered like a chandelier of a tree in an ice storm. And I watched how you struggled to shed your skin to make a new start together like an antidote to ourselves. And how your fangs turned into wishbones and broke apart between your pinky finger and mine and mine got the bigger part three out of four times. If I’d known as much cowboy Zen as I do now I wouldn’t have mistaken a fortune cookie for a real koan and wasted my time trying to break anything open so we could both be free of ourselves together. Sex was always a tsunami in a dead seabed on the moon with you, but what all this time away from you has taught me, is that without love in the mix, there’s no weather. No lifeboats. No shipwrecks. No mermaids calling you to the rocks like an old habit you thought you’d kicked in rehab. And there’s not much of an emotional life to a nightsea that’s flatlining in intensive care. Even if it’s a smart move to give your musical career a good scare now and again.

But I’m not trying to inflict pain upon you for the pain you afflicted me with like the black madonna of killer bees. You were the Aztec Catholic and I got lost in the deep woods like the infidel you made me out to be. The missing thirteenth imam of the Shiites who conscientiously objected to your holy war and more a warrior scholar of the Druids on his own than when I was with you, spent my days trying to decipher the shadows of the Kufic script of the wild apple trees in the exiled orchards around Westport in paint. I fell feloniously into paradise where things encountered each other like bees and flowers spontaneously. They didn’t swarm. And for nine years my heart got along famously with the spearheads that were embedded in it like the relics of bygone Indian wars that drove me off the reservation deeper into the wilderness than any tempter would dare. I said who I was in my solitude and buried my name in the night sums it up pretty much. I watched small things slowly grow for the longest time. I checked a garden every morning for the local news of what went down in the night like corn to a raccoon or a rabbit to a pack of coydogs who got their viciousness from the city that looked upon the country as a pet cemetery where what you once loved unconditionally had a cold-hearted chance to live. Either that, or they didn’t have the integrity to kill them outright. So the wounded were dumped at the side of a dirt road like good physicians to heal themselves. Some people put maggots on their wounds to disinfect them like the corpses of children who died of scarlet fever under their pioneer headstones lost like skulls in the grass epidemics ago. I cauterized mine with fireflies. I sipped home brew with covens of witchy women who asked me if I’d be willing to paint sacred murals in their Satanic shrines in virgin blood they’d blessed for the job. And they didn’t mind when I told them I was into painting country landscapes, but I couldn’t get as rural as all that because I was irreligious without meaning any disrespect to the judas-goats that bound them to the farm. And after they saw my work and caught a whiff of the wolf in me they left me alone to my own hunting magic like Orion on a winter night. A truce between the apostate sheep and the shepherd of wolves without recourse to a lawgiver like Lycurgus to separate the helots from the Spartans. And there I lived among my nine bean rows with one of the noblest women I’ve ever slept with, an artist from Westmount, who was nicknamed Black Savage, though she looked like Nefertiti, who was reputed to be by others who could see deeper than me, the most powerful witch in Ottawa. Sex was never a ritual. It was always an initiation rite. The new moon at its darkest. And then one day Lilith was gone from the garden to see if she could become as famous as Eve without standing in my shadow.

Alone again, heretically, with the black farce of my unconverted personal history repeating itself like an encore of evil clowns, I couldn’t help thanking you in absentia for how much you’d left undone to help me prepare for this event like the foreshadowing of a sad fact embedded in the black pearls of the mystery like a new moon whose youth was eclipsed by the darkness of the truth within her. Queen Honeybone, the Huntress, come back to renew her virginity in the toxic pools of her unicorn eyes spiced with horns and stingers. It’s death to see you again at your bath. But this time I’m not running from your hounds like a white stag or a wild boar. I’m not the shipwreck you tried to turn into a tourist attraction with a marriage proposal that was on the rocks before the first mermaid opened her mouth to sing. This time I’m waiting like a wolf pack of submarines on the moon in all your vital shipping lanes for you to make the first move. And when the jewel at the end of the witching stick of the wizard you broke goes down like the third eye at the end of my dick below the water line, kaboom! Up periscope! Like the lilaceous lifeboats and spotlights of the daffodils trying to trick the sun into shining at midnight to look for survivors in an oil slick. With no chance of history repeating itself like a negative whole number in a burning sea of incommensurable decimals of crack cocaine half a tone off that black bass snake blues guitar that used to sit in the corner like a cormorant on the rocks off shore and sing hauntingly beautiful snake charming lullabies to herself whenever she thought everyone else was sleeping. Queen Honeybone, once the princess bride of a genetic nightmare that pedalled in death like a pyramid, waking up, too late, weeping, with no one at her side but a flowerless wind in the deserted courtyards of her hive. You snorted the pollen and now you cry the hive’s deprived of honey. There’s nothing left to tempt the bears with as you rail the stars of Ursa Major on the one-eyed mirror of a reflecting telescope that finally got what she saw coming. Though it brings no one any joy to catching a falling star and lose a good guitar.

PATRICK WHITE

O LITTLE SISTER

O LITTLE SISTER

O little sister you’re an alley-cat alto-sax

howling on the fire escape

under a blue moon

that’s driven you into heat

just outside my window

for that arsonist boyfriend of yours

who used to puke in my potted geraniums

every time the two of you got drunk enough

to crash across my coffee-table laughing

even with each other for a crutch

you haven’t got a leg to stand on.

I was charmed by your romantic desolation.

I was intrigued by how much original sincerity

you both saw fit to squander on a cliche.

C’est la vie, c’est l’amor, c’est le guerre.

Elvis Presley is well and living in Tweed.

And Arthur Rimbaud is running guns

with Jim Morrison in Ethiopia for Al-Shabab.

Most people work harder at hope

than they do at achieving their downfall

and you were a fire hydrant

and now you haven’t got a hose.

No pun intended

I’ve known you too long

to see you this upended slurring your words

like the simultaneous translator

of an hourglass speaking

out of both sides of its mouth at once.

I don’t know why he left you.

Maybe there was nothing left to put out.

You burned out.

A piece flew off your heat shield upon re-entry.

Maybe any man who couldn’t hold his liquor

realizes sooner than later he couldn’t hold you.

I don’t know.

Go ask my geraniums.

They’ve got more to say about him than I do.

You make your death bed.

You got to die in it.

Next time build your house on stilts

in Stanthorpe Queensland

to keep the snakes away from your pillow.

What can I say?

He had a shoulder on his chip

that just couldn’t hold his end of the world up?

And don’t get me wrong.

I’m not laughing at your pain.

I don’t laugh at pain.

Pain is pain.

Different planets.

Different moons.

Who hasn’t gone swimming with dolphins

in the saturnine seas of Titan

or dropped a comet like a match

on a methane moon of Neptune?

Endomorphs and dopamines

can make you do a lot of funny things

that love is at a loss for words to justify.

Even if just for one wild night

of occult hunting magic

everyone longs to run with the wolves.

And howl, o little sister, you can hear them howling

in their blood agony at the waxing moon

as if something had died within them

that was so deep and crucial

it tore their hearts out

in an ecstasy of unrepentant pain.

And many many years later

when the solid abyss and hollowness of life

has grown even greater

you can still hear their voices

screaming like winter winds

above the timber-line

so high-pitched no echo

has ever been able to reach that high again

without shattering like a night bird

against the mirage of the open sky in the window.

Like you, little sister, now.

I’m not a sump-pump for anybody’s tears

not even my own

but I’ve been known

to throw a little heavy water

on a nuclear meltdown every now and again.

Pain. Separation. Loss. Dream death

you keep reliving like an afterlife in your sleep

you’re dying to wake up from

like a coma that’s lost everything worth waking up to.

Not two. Not two. Not two.

That’s the way it is here.

That’s as far as words go.

That’s where Statius takes over

from Vergil on the nightshift

and the stars nod off like children

who couldn’t finish the story

and the quality of the poetry drops

as dark genius opts out

of the company of bright mediocrities

trying too hard to make it a better world

than it needs to be.

For things it didn’t do.

And in a merciful world

that lived up to its teachings

and didn’t shrink the heart

with fear of its own extremes

while everything else is expanding

shouldn’t be asked to suffer like a placebo

in the glands of spurious cure.

And, yes, I know sometimes

it’s hard to keep up with the mysteries

like the elements of life on a geometric scale.

How many jugulars does a woman have

for someone to cut

like the downed powerlines

of the Medusa’s head

for having cast the first stone at herself?

You can wake the serpent fire

at the base of your spine

just above your coccyx

the hardest bone in your body

the little throne

the modest gravestone

you’ll be resurrected on

when you’re summoned from the dead,

but you can’t train love

to bite the people you want it too

and run like an antidote to the rescue.

That’s why you’re getting high

on your own poison right now.

That’s why your drunken tears

oscillate between a broken chandelier

that’s bleeding out

and acid rain that burns like love

congealing into a new ice age.

However deep you dig the grave

to bury someone you once really loved

even a desert at night

when the stars weren’t looking

wouldn’t be enough to fill it in.

It’s a wound without scar tissue

for the rest of your life.

The ghosts keep being pulled out of the box

like that kleenex you keep using

to dry your eyes at this seance

you’ve called on the spur of the moment

to be appalled by how lonely it is

to plead with the dead for severance.

PATRICK WHITE