EVERYTHING I WANTED TO BE

EVERYTHING I WANTED TO BE

Everything I wanted to be.

Not me.

Just like you.

I remember getting up early

every Saturday morning in Victoria

and going out with my mother

and two sisters and younger brother

and sometimes my grandmother

to scour the acres and acres

of East Indian woodlots

drying the newly split

book-shaped slabs of wood

as if someone had just put out the fire

in the Library of Alexandria

and left this toppled tower

of bottom-feeding erudition

on the outskirts of town

for beer-bottles left over from the night before

and wild blackberry patches

we had to get to before the sun and the birds did.

People went there on a Friday night

to drink and fuck in these heavy swells

of reeking spruce and fir

with Prussian blue mussel shells

still clustered in bunches to the bark

like the sea’s answer to grapes.

We dumped the stale beer out

along with the used condoms and cigarette-butts

and if it weren’t for the fact

we were swimming in wood

we might have been mistaken for pearl divers

given how we came up for air

gasping with excitement

that we had found another one.

It was all just a big impromptu Easter egg hunt

put on by the local church of Satan

for those kids the Easter bunny had missed.

Two bits a dozen

or two cents a piece

stacked like spent artillery casings

in a two-wheeled wire-mesh grocery cart

that made the bottles clink

like a Glockenspiel in a hailstorm

everytime my mother moved it

to a more strategic location.

We didn’t come like gypsies

or crows or seagulls to the woodlots.

This was a full blown military occupation

and our survival in between welfare cheques

depended on it

like William Carlos Williams’ little red wheelbarrow

in the rain beside the white chickens.

We drank the black blood

out of the arachnid eye sacs of the berries

crushing them against our palettes with our tongues

just like John Keats

crushed that autumnal grape in his ode to joy

just before they went too mushy to pick

and took on a mouldy taste

that felt like spider fur in your mouth.

Powerful green breakers of berries

that could suck you down into their undertow

and hold you in their depths

like spiny sea urchins, sawfish, razor-wire

or giant octopi with thorny tentacles instead of suckers

you could stick like stain-glass sunflowers to a window

if you know how to lick them just right

to make their suction cups

in conjunction with your spit

stick longer than lipstick French kissing

a pricey glass of champagne.

Even then I was dreaming of the finer things in life.

Thoroughbred goblets one day

but for then those noisy beer-bottles

like the sweating horses of pussy-whipped Neptune.

And would you believe it

we were all together happy back then

laughing at what we had to do for a living.

We were salvagers of a shipwreck

that had been cut up for firewood

and these long-necked empties in our hands

as if we grabbed a flock of cormorants by the throat

useless to everyone except ourselves

after having delivered their message

like a lifeboat at the end of a James Bond movie

to those marooned here on a Friday night

weren’t beer-bottles but Greek amphorae.

Na. I don’t believe it either.

You make things up to adapt to the lack of them all

when you’re a kid

when you’re poor

when you dream just so

you won’t lose the habit of it

when you fall between the cracks

like a penny down a gutter

because you know too much

by the time you’re six

about what happens when you throw the full moon

like a coin down a wishing well

and how little difference there is

between the things that don’t happen

and the things that aren’t true

and the things that just go splash like Basho’s frog.

But happy, yes, in moments like that

collecting beer bottles in the East Indian woodlots

on the outskirts of town

as if we were shared the same joyous delirium

of improbably getting away with something like our lives

because were desperately ingenious

in the way we’d make walkways through the blackberries

by throwing down planks end to end

and topping our tin laundry buckets

and leaking silver collanders

that always reminded me of bleeding starmaps off

with the furthest, the best, the sweetest we saved till the last.

When you’ve only got the slimmest of half a chance to make it

the future’s always more innocent than the present

and the past might be out on parole any day now

for things you shouldn’t ask a kid to understand

even though you know he does.

Everyone I wanted to be. Not me.

Just like you.

When I wasn’t preoccupied

with beer bottles and blackberries

abandoned orchards of peaches plums apples

and the geraniums and marigolds

I’d steal from the neighbours gardens

for my mother who would invariably ask

as she was transplanting them

without expecting me to answer

where they came from.

Buckets of peanut butter

heavy as bells chafing our shins

as we tried to walk with them like awkward steeples

at the backdoor of the peanut butter factory,

running an extortion racket on telephone booths

by knowing how to tip the horseshoe of the receiver

upside down for loose change

that had run out of luck.

All the local churches

playing musical chairs with our souls

in a game of hamper hamper

who’s got the hamper this month

and who suffered their little children to come unto us,

potatoes too bruised for the potato factory,

a face cord of salmon from the fisherman

coming in with their catches to refuel

down by Johnson Street Bridge

where I’d collect pigeon eggs under the girders for friends.

When it wasn’t this

I was teaching myself algebra

from an old khaki green Salvation Army math book

on my grade six summer vacation

my mother had picked up for a dime

because after a fighter pilot, a cartoonist, a paleontologist,

a street-wise prodigy found dead in my bed in the morning

from an accidental suicide,

I wanted to be an astronomer.

Except for most of all my love affairs

I have suffered few wounds as deep

as when I used to cry in my sleep

for inconsolable hours every night

between the ages of seven and ten

because I’d been born too early

to step foot on another planet

where you didn’t have to walk the plank

to get at the beer-bottles and best blackberries

before the sun and the birds did.

Everything I wanted to be. Not me.

Just like you.

But hey, look at me now.

I’m a poet

and I’m more spaced out

than I could have ever been

in anyone’s air force

and even if I haven’t discovered

a habitable planet to put down roots in yet

I’ve been walking on stars for light years

by putting down planks like poems end to end

to gorge on the choicest blackberries

on a Saturday morning in the East Indian woodlots

as if I were happy again

even among all these luminaries

with better myths of origin than mine

being what I am.

Just like you.

Not me.

Everything I wanted to be.

In spades.

In cornucopias and windfalls.

Buckets full of blackberries.

A rickety grocery cart

clinking with two dozen beer-bottles

the spoils of a Roman triumph

as we rode our golden chariot through a slum

me, my brother and sisters,

sometimes my grandmother,

and Mum.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SILENCE HAS GROWN SO MAGNANIMOUS IN THE NIGHT

THE SILENCE HAS GROWN SO MAGNANIMOUS IN THE NIGHT

The silence has grown so magnanimous in the night

it encompasses all of space and time

in a palace of dark matter

with light beaming through

the cracks of the planets

that have been stacked into walls

like the skulls the Mongols heaped up

like the foundation stones of Samarkand,

Olmecs in Teotihuacan,

or on a gentler note, Golgotha.

Upon one skull you can build a church.

And an Orphic skull might look like

a dead moon to ordinary eyes

but when your inner vision waxes to full

you realize when it drops its jaw

as if it were gaping at something transfixing

to prophesy what comes next

as you asked it to

life is swarming all over it

like black ants over the globular clusters

of the white peonies abandoned by a farmhouse garden.

Two twenty a.m. and I’m sitting

on the tie of a high train trestle

trying not to get slivers in my ass

and black creosote all over

my last clean pair of jeans.

I’m dangling my feet in the abyss below me

like a kid gone fishing in a Norman Rockwell painting

and positioning my arms like the legs of a French easle

so I can tilt my head back like a telescope

on an alta-azimuth mount

and look at the explosive array of stars before me

without falling off my vertiginous perch

because my gerry-mandered tripod

couldn’t keep its bearings straight.

It’s a mistake to count on a crutch for a rung

on this endless extension ladder

on the back of a fire-engine

because it couldn’t reach

the windowsills of the stars

missing a dimension or two

to reach the woman in the moon

with her hands up against the glass

screaming for someone to come to her rescue

as the windows melt faster than they can weep.

Stars are to me

what cocaine is to a mirror

in a reflecting telescope with clock-drive.

I get a rush every time I rail them through my eyes,

shoot them under my tongue

or o.d. on them sitting on a train track

thinking how weird and surrealistic

my addiction to them has made me over the years

that I only stopped to piss by the side of the road

and risking bears

made my way through the leafless trees

to end up out here in the clear where I could see better

how much higher yet there was to aspire to

and how much further to fall.

Bellatrix, Rigel, Saiph, Betelgeuse,

Alnilam, Alnitak and Mintaka.

Orion at the end of deer-hunting season

extending its license to kill by a week

north of highway 7

as it crosses zenith.

I’m not playing Russian roulette with a train trestle

but I doubt I could dodge the bullet

were one to come my way

even though it wouldn’t make any sense

given that we still need each other for support

each in our own special way.

As it is I’m sitting in the middle of the Road of Ghosts

as the natives called the Milky Way

mesmerized by the doe-glare of the oncoming stars

that pass right through me

as if a head-on collision were a redundancy

their deer-whistles couldn’t avoid.

Three thousand five hundred western miles that way home.

Twenty-five miles outside of Perth near Bolingbroke

I wonder what my mother’s doing now

three hours behind me

in a time-zone with more of a future than mine

and if she ever

when she thinks of me

conceives of a bird on a wire

perilously suspended in space

like the last whole note

to drop out of a song

that’s getting ready to leave for the winter.

I raise myself up on my hands

and my legs straight out into space

on a balance beam at the Olympics

I swing like a loveseat on a country porch

to see if the daredevil boy in me

is still fit to wear my balls like the man

it’s sometimes laughable to think that I am.

I used to do the same for her

when I climbed to the topmost branches

of the abandoned orchards of the Saanich Peninsula

to throw the choicest apples down

she used to catch in her kerchief one by one.

Looking down as I waited

for her to catch the next one

I’d watch her gently arrange them like skulls

at the foot of a siege ladder

with her son on the highest rung of all

not listening to her warnings,

disappearing over the holy walls of Jerusalem

like a crusader that had taken it a step too far

and realized there was as far to fall

on the other side of the infidels

as there was on the side that God was on.

Now I keep my heroism to myself

like something I’m slightly ashamed of

like a movie star with a stand-in stunt man.

I take chances.

Great subjective risks

with dire physical consequences

to keep spiritual things material

by refusing to abstract my senses.

This isn’t a train trestle in Bolingbroke.

It’s the bridge of Chinvat

that Zoroaster said everyone

among the holy and the damned

would have to cross

raised up from the dead on the Day of Judgement

to see hell before it was decided

whether you were a son of the lie

or the son of a truth that got double-crossed.

But given my indifference to both

as if they were just spontaneous happenings

in a charged particle field reversing spin

as high as wide as far as deep as I can see

in all directions at once

out here alone by myself,

the exception that got left behind,

all I’m aware of are the stars

and the tops of the cedar trees

tiered like rustic pagodas

trying to fly when the wind

gets under their wings

like shaggy boughs

that never make it off the ground.

Nothing but stars.

Nothing but open sky and moonset.

Nothing but space and time and Jupiter

and the Hesperides in their apple orchards

wondering what Alcyone in the Pleiades

thinks she’s got over them

that’s worth so much more of my attention

I can almost forget where I am and let go

if I weren’t as unattainable to her

as she is to me.

Look at me Mum

no hands

at the top of a tree forty feet below me

like a pine cone

with all its eyelids open

that doesn’t care where it lands

among all these meteors

shaken out of the radiant of the Leonids

like the Cannonball Express

given how many light years it’s been

since you were last there to catch it

like a falling star

and put it in your pocket

and never let it fade away

though we both know

it’s a little too late

a train too far

and a night too deep for that.

PATRICK WHITE

AZAZEL SAYS

AZAZEL SAYS

Azazel says

if you don’t live it somebody else

is going to end up with your future.

Insert local habitations and names thereof here.

Perth, Ontario. Population six thousand.

From here to Kingston the pioneers did nothing

in the way of land naming but plagiarize Scotland.

But it isn’t less airy here and now

than it ever was anywhere else.

The streetlamps go on like repeating decimals.

Venus hot and bothered in the green tangerine dusk.

And even through the doe-glare of the highway headlights

and the light pollution of those who never look up,

Jupiter in the east above the Smokin’ Eagles Smoke Shop

on Lanark County 10 heading toward Franktown,

the lilac capital of Canada.

You want to know what the doe feels

in front of an oncoming car sometime

look up at the stars and try to make sense of it all.

But that was in Richardson, five miles outside of Perth.

So where are we now?

In deep space?

Or back on earth?

Everybody edgy until the first snow.

Off balance astraddle a snow line

one foot on a summer beach

and the other on an ice-floe.

Hail today and cold.

Ave November.

How now brown cow?

However thick you lay it on

you’ll still look the same in the spring

when the snow’s gone.

The loosestrife and the mustard ruined.

The deer herd culled.

The moose shot, cut up and bled

and wrapped in a brown paper cover

like the meatier parts of a dirty novel.

Brown fields still in a state of denial

with a dirgeful mist hovering over them

like the last few wraiths of chlorine gas

on a few acres along the Somme

that have been allowed to return to nature again

with some enormous deformities

of man woman animal child and land.

The wild herds of pampas grass

have neglected their manes again

and they look like paintbrushes with cowlicks.

There are some fields as neat and predictable

as a pop song two minutes long with a hook.

And then there are the improvised jazz jams

in the drainage ditches along the highway

where the cattails get it on

with whatever weed shows up

in violation of its parole

to take a load off Benny.

Blown out tires, hub caps, roadkill,

and the wild irises in tight indigo nightgowns

who sang their hearts out on heroin

the way Billie Holiday sang the blues on deadly nightshade.

Azazel says

abundance is the root of all desolation.

How fast things age is a measure

of the depths of their disappointment.

You want your cake. You want your cake.

You stuff your mouth.

You blow the candles out

and then the cake eats you.

Life lives to eat itself and be hungry.

Probably true.

But November’s killed its appetite.

Silos like silver bullets way in the distance.

Little monopoly farmhouses

with mythically inflated driveways.

A phalanx of black iron gates

with crests and spears

and two cheesey lions just like those

you’d find outside a bank

that was trying to look imperial.

They’re not farms anymore.

They’re estates

with a Roman legion for gates.

And meanwhile back in town,

the pioneer suburb of Ottawa,

in an upstairs apartment on a back porch

overlooking a deserted parking lot

a nineteen-fifties style burgundy couch

with a bas relief of paisley brocade

abandoned by some weekend hippies

is growing too damp and organic to sit on

and smells like a sweating horse with black mould

the longer it’s left out in the rain.

And there are field mice, not many, a few

like the Roma of Europe

who’ve found a niche in life

among the loose change, nuggets of bud

log jam of unsalvageable cigarettes

in its crevices and crannies,

a selection of old lighters

each with an individual story to tell

and the coiled cartoon springs and stuffing

of an era that liked to round things off

like the bumpers of their cars and couches and women

as if they knew even way back then

they were going to sit for awhile

and look long and hard and hopelessly west

for the sun to come up just once at dusk

in the land of the midnight sun

and prove them right about their point of view.

But the mice don’t really care about

who got the window-seat on the bus

or how much baggage they carried on with them

like the elephant to the south of them.

They’re snug right where they are

and they travel light

happily balanced between security and a fire-escape

like the arsonist in all of us in autumn

as the Canada geese high overhead honk their horns

like the paddy waggons of the Keystone Cops in passing

as they leave the set with probable cause

to bust another marijuana patch like a pot boiler.

Azazel says

forget about the mice

forget about the geese.

The die is cast.

And there’s no turning back now.

Stand on the Gore Street Bridge over the Rideau Canal

and watch how the fish follow the Tay river

in suspended animation

and how the last of the swallows

to inhabit its fieldstones

cross it again and again without hesitation

like the flash of sabres that never clash

gleefully building a nation

like a lot of little holes in the wall

the birds can come back to

with a moat of their own

to frustrate the feral cats

that live under the bridges of Gore street

like famished Fenians on the prowl.

Azazel says

the nations have been unpeopled

by their governments

and data isn’t history

though it took a thousand deaths

from malaria and alcohol-related-on-the-job accidents

to make it what it is today.

Some crushed by falling trees.

Some drowning drunk

trying to swim across the river

to acquisition another bottle of whiskey.

Scarlet fever and childbirth on the farm.

It’s hard to number the miscarriages and still births

these old grey sway-backed arks and barns

that look like the last of the mammoths in the distance

have seen around here.

The nightmare febrile locks of stranded hair

that snaked over the foreheads

of the young wet wives who died

into their second year

of trying to continue a blood line

all the way from Ottawa to Kingston

like the plagiarized names

of all these small towns

that sprang up like stone-mills and water wheels

all along her birth canal.

British half-pay officers in beaver skins

building dams alongside the beavers

as if this were Kandahar, Afghanistan

and tribal Scottish highland chieftains

who ran Renfrew like the Taliban.

People have a way of abstracting

what’s crucial about the stem cells of life

from the sweat and lechery

that went into producing them.

Walking boats like reluctant debutantes

that have been taken under the arm

up and down the stair wells

of a palace of water in high heels.

Spidery horse-drawn carriages on springs

that learned to sing

to the beat of corduroy roads

and keep a decent pleat in their prose.

Imported butlers holding out silver plate

to accept the salutary donations

of the calling cards who dropped in

to see if So and So were as thin

as the last letter she sent them.

People who took a bath in their own grave every day

and left a ring around the tub

like the ripple in the heartwood of a tree

on the growing edge of history.

Who considers the spit on the back of the stamp

that went off to war for king and country

just to have a return address to come back to

like a river you can’t step into twice

even if you were to build

one of the world’s longest canals

with post office boxes in it for the swallows?

Azazel says

it’s casually ironic

that one of the first things these people did

to work all this up

into a life and a home and a heritage of their own

was kill the Algonquin village next door

for having one of its own.

History is a screening myth

to cover up what someone did with the bones.

If they’re sacred, they’re sacred by default.

No one on the bridge disagrees

even when they see

weaving its way like a lifeline among the catfish

a long trail of blood

all the way back to the village.

Brutal to have one people vanguish another

and then turn on its own

out of sympathy

for what it’s just so irreparably damaged.

That’s why I need Azazel around.

I may be the lightning rod.

But he’s the ground.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MARTYROLOGY OF A MORPHINE MESSIAH

Azazel sends a black sheep out into this desert of stars to look for you. Even at forty, though less of a stepson now and more of a friend, and light years away from the sunny planet where I stayed for awhile with your mother, you still belong to the people in this life who love you, and you hope that’s blood, but just as often as not it’s a mix of holy oil and violated water. So let’s be clear as starmud about this. I love you. And that’s a mix of mosh pits at the Nuremberg rallies and jazz. And something softer that I can only listen to one side of because the other side makes me weep. Sometimes I look at you like the dragon that guarded it must have looked at the Golden Fleece on hot August afternoons when copulating flies were the only thing that was happening. If I’ve been the scarred warhorse for the last twenty years of your life, you’ve been the radiant gazelle in a blond savannah of long hair, blue-eyed and artsy, a little flossy, sociopathically paranoid of the female principle of the world, because you are the son of a single mother, that insists counter-intuitively that you become a woman like Tiresias the blind prophet every seven years or so just to see that they’re as humanly fallible as you are and get more pleasure out of sex. And being mortal means you’re as susceptible as anyone else to what you’ve been spreading around without showing any symptoms yourself. Your flying carpets are infected with a spiritual disease that ties whatever wavelength you’re on into gravitational eyes and knots in the heartwood of a birch tree, because that’s what you’d be if you were one. Leaves trembling in every little breeze like your hands when you go to paint, flammable naphtha under the bark, like those mood swings when you’re jonesing for the moon, and one moment you’re an arsonist in a fireworks factory of mystic insight, and the next, you’re just another dumpy fire-hydrant trying to put things out.

You remember Azazel? My anti-ego on the dark side of enlightenment? He’s fascinated by the way you keep shapeshifting your states of mind like a mini-multiverse that’s trying to keep more than one balloon up in the air at once like a one man, sword-swallowing, fire-eating juggler under the big tent of a small county fair like the one that encamps here in Perth every year with the same old rides. Little brother, friend, I never had a father myself, so I faked it a bit to be something approximately paternal for you. I didn’t feel all that comfortable in the role, and sugared the medicine a bit with a few stars of my own, and spurned the rod and the whip and the psychological assassins I could have sent out like the Old Man of the Mountain. I never keel-hauled you on the moon. And if there was ever a point I was trying to make like a sabre, I never made you walk the plank blindfolded. I had a son once. He disappeared out of my life thirty years ago. He lives. And I expect I’m the ghost of a lot of strange feelings and eerie intensities he can’t understand except by theorizing there must have been another large planet that was knocked out of the configuration of the solar system he finds himself in now, early in its formative years. Without meaning to. Bring on the fuck-ups like the sacred clowns who toy with the old taboos in gales of ironic black laughter. Everyone I wanted to be. Not me. Same as you. And it’s as impossible to prove to a welfare mother that she gave birth to a winning lottery ticket of a son as it is for you to believe you actually won.

You won. You’re here. Wandering around on the earth with the rest of us like sleepwalkers gathering nuts and berries before it’s too late to sustain the lifespan of the long dream we’re having like a nightmare of being suddenly woken up in the middle of a brutal winter unprepared. For what? An encore by popular demand? Regardless of what condition your human condition’s been in, I will say this, you have a big heart, and I’ve watched you stay loyal to a tree long after the other birds have left, and even Azazel who thinks you’re a court-jester with a chip on your shoulder, admires you for this, but says don’t expect credit where credit is due because street justice is an extortionist racket that eats its own first. And what kind of martyr is it who doesn’t expect to suffer for something good he does without even being aware of the electric chair he’s sitting in and how when something’s done right here

the lights flicker like a power shortage in hell. The page boys of Prince Valiant with your kind of hair cut have long since abandoned their childish crusades to encipher their own hieroglyphic fantasies in the cartoon columns of the temples of Karnak. True deceivers. And unbelieving infidels who prefer their own tribal heretics to anyone else’s false prophets. Unionized religion. With no rights accorded to those who work on the nightshift like nightwatchmen and lighthouses and certain unassuming stars whose eyes have adapted to the dark for less than nothing. And I know you’re trying to develop a reputation as a seer, but until you can go down on the Medusa and not turn into stone, and you’ve looked at nature red in tooth and claw as if it were your own like the irisless eye in the blackhole of a shark’s pupil just before it milks out to bite, and not seen a rainbow, a covenant of peace, a pot of gold, the moon dog of a Bronze Age engagement ring, or even a troll under the Rainbow Bridge where the herbal hippie chicks go to commit suicide like medicine cabinets, you’re just looking at the world through two chunks of coal in the fat head of a seasonal snowman who breaks down into tears at the thought of global warming. You’re not flowing diamond yet. You’re just another crystal skull in the coal pits of Pennsylvania handing out environmental pamphlets like starmaps to make it easier for someone to spot you shining whenever you blow your mind like a supernova above your manger as if you were strip mining your own immaculate conception of the mother who gave you birth. And I won’t say physician heal thyself or charge you to raise yourself up from the dead to prove your miraculous healing powers aren’t just the rebranding of the same old snake oil trying to read your future in a Tarot pack of warning labels. Terminal symbolitis. You’re dying of an overdose of meaning in a cosmic rehab centre where Sisphysus breaks his rock up into a small avalanche and boils it in a spoon like a smithy at a sacred forge to heat the iron ore up and pull it like a sword out of his veins. And Azazel says to remind you that you’re not Sir Launcelot but Parsifal the mottled fool, and sipping like a hummingbird from a spoonful of ashes isn’t the same thing as drinking from the holy grail as if it were a methadone treatment programme some drugstore put in place to get the ailing kingdom to kick the absurd like a rock down the same road you took as a boy on your way home from school. Don’t trust any cure that makes a profit off of suffering like a dispensing fee. In a snake pit. In a clean needle exchange. The toxins are the darling changelings of the anti-dotes. Beware of oviparous births in your love nest. You can hatch serpents out of those cosmic eggs you’ve been sitting on as easily as you can nightingales. And hey, little brother, since when does the messenger of the gods, Hermes the Thrice-Blessed, even as a new moon of occult knowledge, go from house to house like a passenger pigeon brokering deals for everyone else in exchange for a toke, a rock, a pill, the leftover crumbs of the dream that fell from the corners of somebody else’s eyes, like a trader on the Toronto Stock Exchange bundling mortgages for the pharmaceutical companies that run a small town like a junkie’s budget into the ground of his being? I’ve seen sparrows hunting seeds and worms in leftover gardens and ferrets in the fall hunting sparrows with the same quick nervous energy you expend crisscrossing the street enervating your last quantum of dark energy on what you think you need to live another painful day on earth. You may roar like a lion but you hunt like a fly. And, anyway, as Azazel says, even in hell the hardest of demons don’t like to see an eagle being led around on a leash by tapeworm. It offends their sense of aesthetic distortion to see a magnificent predator enslaved to spineless parasite. Hic sunt dracones. Not vampire bats. Deep root powers of the earth who spread their wings like waking volcanoes, not the blood thinners of no-see-um succubi dreaming of falling in love with a blood bank like the gift that just keeps on giving the more it takes from the foodchain.

I once told you you could charm your way through life up to the age of twenty-face and then the spell wears off like a snake skin or the aura around a rainbow body depending on whether they used serpent fire or holy water to anoint you at birth. Twenty-five. And you’re forty. The funeral bells have long since turned your wishing wells into the steeples of a fire-worshipping church by now, and the eternal flame looks a little more hurried than it should with all that time on its hands to brood on why it feels like the lonely flightfeather of the last phoenix that flew by on its way to the sun. O Icarus, Icarus, my ex-stepson, Icarus, I see you lining up like a stealth fighter on a Nazdac runway flapping your arms like an aerial photograph of a totemic self-portrait you recently tarred and feathered trying to gain enough altitude on drugs and overly euphoric women with brain-damaged hearts to meet enough extraterrestrials who can understand you, you could become the cult leader of occult ufos. And somehow prove you’re not as crazy as the rest of us afterall. There’s madness in your method. There’s a triumph in your mortality. You want to ride a golden chariot through a slum that never thought you would ever amount to anything more than the golden boy of last year’s New Year’s baby. And look at you, now. Muddy Waters, there’s another mule kickin’ in your stall. What happened to the manger? Now that all that holiday spirit has entered you like a float in a parade you once peed on as if you were being tested for drugs? And you’re so fucked-up, as most of us are in this labyrinth of cul de sacs we pursue like the life of the mind following the counter-intuitive leads of artistic breadcrumbs we dropped in our sleep to find our way out of this retrogressively, you’re talented by acclamation. You’ve hybridized your bestiary. Birds have fangs. And snakes sing in a perfect harmony of wavelengths to greet the morning like the powerlines of a barber-shop quartet in the rain. Auuuuum. Do wa, do wa, do wa ditty. An independently sponsored approximate haiku moment whose opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the current broadcaster. Blow up your nose. Snow in Tibetan begging bowls. Up here in the mountains. You crap once. It’s good for life. Nobody has to keep their shit together. And to play fair with the square-minded. Nobody has to lose it. Even if time on the food chain is your just desert for breaking the law of diminishing returns like a missing link that didn’t want to cultivate wild grasses into a civilization based on agriculture where all the children starve to death, the shit you put into your mouth should be of at least a little higher quality than the shit that comes out. You’d be better off cannibalizing yourself than living on that ghost food that surfeits you like a blood transfusion of pharmaceutical nectar and no-name brand ambrosia. There’s no chromosome in your space-shaped fortune-cookie that’s going to change the fate of this nightmare in the Land of the Lotus Eaters. And any koans around here that might be worth breaking into to get a fix on yourself, have long since blown their minds like milk weed pods from the sixties and scattered their thoughts of a better world like a thousand hail-marys all at once on the last play of the game to try and make it out of their end-zone. And it’s not unusual for a hippie mother to give birth to a fascist kid, or a fascist kid to turn his reactionary mother into a hippie who looks at her life as a bad acid flashback that’s gone viral on youtube and appears as if it’s about to be picked up like a reality show on a major network with a viewing audience ripped out of its mind. And you flagellate the world with savage indignation because it’s not logical, not rational, not answerable to the crystal paradigms you hang like swords and chandeliers above everybody’s heads because they want to fox-trot when you think it would be more appropriate if they followed in your painted footprints on the ballroom floor, and learned to waltz the way you did. But not everybody’s got a hand-stand in them, or even a novel, and sometimes it’s even hard to find a line of implausible poetry.

Drug-induced, alcohol-exacerbated, pharmaceutically suppressed schizophrenia. O.K. Caesar was an epileptic, Neitzsche had syphilis, Byron had a club foot, and Apollinaire almost had his whole head shot off in World War I. The black sinister hand shapes the clay on the wheel as surely as the white dextrous one does. An over-compensated disability could almost pass for a definition of genius. Or juno, if you’re a woman. Or both, if you’re really honest with yourself. But you want to salt the clouds of unknowing that make the whole thing ineffably mysterious with dry ice to make it rain acidic tears that anyone ever doubted your insight. We tolerate the mystery. The mystery tolerates us. It may be irrational, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t clear. Like stars are at a distance. Though up close their nuclear cores must feel just as confused as you are with the fission and fusion that’s going on inside your head. Yet out of that turmoil. The elements of life. All the way from light-hearted hydrogen and helium up to and beyond the heavy metal anti-psychotic likes of Lithium. They used to tell me in creative writing that it was crucial for me to find my own voice. Only one? For a lifetime. For everything? One voice fits all? But one day I did find my voice only to realize it was a stem cell, and quickly multiplied into thousands of others like vital organs each with a function of their own. I wasn’t a lonely folk guitar with white line fever hitchhiking down a midnight highway to get to my next gig in Toronto. I was a symphony orchestra. I was a whole tree full of birds. I wasn’t a seance unto myself. I lot of different ghosts spoke through me over the years. And it’s the same for schizophrenia from my point of view. Just two? To handle every situation that comes up in a lifetime? Go polyphrenic. And if it’s all just a big ego delusion in the first place who cares if it’s one mirage or many? Go hydra-headed. Tolerance, see? Five petals open. One flower blooms. And it’s o.k. to hold a seance in the middle of a mystery. Whatever comes comes. But not an exorcism. Who decides whose shoes get to stay neatly parked outside the door and who gets the boot because they’ve been tracking starmud into the house as if they lived in a pig-sty? You say you’re into light. The white magic of the radiance. But the light is omnidirectional and it’s got to light up hell just as well as it does paradise. It doesn’t illuminate just one side of its eyes the way you do. Or were you talking about flashlights? Head lights, spot lights, search lights, the aurora borealis as opposed to the aurora australis? Let everybody throw a little light on the mystery as far as they can, each according to their own candle power whether they understand it like a firefly, a lightning bolt, a light house, the momentary flare of a match in a dark room, traffic lights, the light at the end of the tunnel, or the Andromeda galaxy. Everybody shine. Who knows what flowers might come of it? Intense heat, unusual sprouts. Azazel, for example.

You say you’ve got a bad back. There are rungs broken on the ladder. You got into a car drunk with a drunk. And won again. You lived when it flipped. You see how you live to escape the danger you place yourself in? You bait your own leg hold trap to see if you can get away with something. It’s like playing Russian roulette. There are never any losers when it comes right down to it. Bang. Click. Everybody wins. Nothing but theatre after life. Just the same, you might find a wild fox or an opportunistic coyote toying with a trapline. Never a wolf. They’re smarter than that. They’d rather turn a porcupine like a needle exchange with their nose than stick it in something like that. Your friends are talking about intervention and I know you hate them for that. I’ve watched you carefully pulling the pins and needles of their remarks out of your psyche like a voodoo doll out to prove they’re not quills they’re mystic spearheads of Bronze Age insight and you’re so advanced in your weaponry you’re living in the twenty-second century. Different strokes of your atomic clock for different folks I suppose. And some of what they say is freaked with malice and gossip and excessive small town excoriation for the things they themselves did yesterday. Winter’s coming on, and you know how people would rather put a skidmark on the black white screen, a little blood spatter, than look at nothing. Because they have no inner resources my mother would say, though there are ten cubic cords of two year old red oak stacked in the woodshed. But it’s not easy to make a rabbit run in a white-out so you’ve got something to chase that makes you feel Canadian and dangerous. I say cool it. You say chill out. And our body temperatures drop by ten degrees. And I can feel the edgy shadow of the knife cross my throat as the white swan you were a moment ago goes into total eclipse. But I wouldn’t let anyone take you away. Especially when I hear your mother’s walking out on you and your girlfriend’s just told you that she’s slept with some dog who was panting under the table for something to fall off like a morsel off of Caesar’s plate, if you can remember any Shakespeare. Right now you’re a mythic inflation of yourself. Not a Saturn booster. A helium weather balloon. An inert gas in the upper atmosphere. Gills on the moon finding it hard to breathe in a sea of shadows. A fever you contracted from a dream. But that’s not camphor under your nose. And I know you’re looking for another mirage in the mirror of the medicine chest you’ve addicted to lethal placebos, but it doesn’t look like the stately pleasure domes of Xanadu from here. And you’ve got no right to make people care for your mortality if you’re not going to let them ride with you in your golden chariot in triumph. Through Perth or Persepolis. No matter. You’re riding through your own ruins like time-lapse photography wondering where all the bling and flash went.

So what do you do? You carve. You paint. You write. If the fear comes over you. You give it a name. You dedicate a poem to it. As Rilke suggests. You kiss that dragon back into a princess. You be a good apple tree. You express yourself. Not to save the world, though a little bit of that may come inadvertently of its own accord. You make blossoms, you grow branches, you recite leaves, you produce apples. The bears, the birds, the wasps, the worms, the artists, the lovers, who doesn’t benefit from it? By their fruits ye shall know them. Who the fuck are you? Or anything or anyone of us if it weren’t for the fact we’re nothing if not expressive? Like the sea and its weather. Expressive. Whether there are shipwrecks littered like yarrow sticks all over the seabed in the Book of Changes or all your arrows are stealing their plumage from the very birds they’re trying to target, or mother pelicans are feeding regurgitated sardines to baby birds while cormorants bob on the logs on a halcyon sea. There’s no disconnect between the sea and its weather. You and what goes on in your head. This is you. And as it happens, this is the all inclusive, eternally premiering movie of your life. As it happens. As it makes you up fractal by fractal. You’re not a boarder in the House on Elm Street. You’re the camera man. You look at a star. In your case, Castor and Pollux in Gemini. Your eye makes it a star. The star makes it your eye. Everything’s like that. See? Expressive. Creatively collaborative without trying to save anyone out of the ordinary. Making things does that. Spinning mulberry trees out of a silkworm’s ass. You haven’t got time to hang on to your misery long enough to make it an identity because you’ve got both hands full and you’re always dropping stuff. Expressively. People see you yachting around town with two or three canvases under your arm for sale and some of the old farmers around here will begin to see what kind of tree you are and give you the name their grandfathers taught them. And your friends will begin to see that even a birch that the beavers have gnawed through when it’s flat face-down on the ground trying to make the whole earth its death mask isn’t a disability but a creative resource. And your madness will grow more intriguingly intelligible to them. They’ll see the darkness inside as ore the gold pours out of like your hair. Express yourself. When has a storm ever not come too early for calm weather? What does the applause of the waves on the surface for some stunt a flying fish pulled off mean to the bottom feeders? In those depths you shine by yourself. You don’t wait for the moon to do the job for you.

You’re addicted to addiction. So hook up with something that’s just as habitually good for you and you’re the only dealer. Express yourself. In or out of control. Just as you are, whatever the hell that means, and don’t try to take control of things like a steering wheel on a sunami when you’ve already gone down with the yacht. Check out the lost continent of Mu and express yourself. Because Mu’s you too. And your sister there. She’s Atlantis. Azazel’s a refugee and I was the original land mass of Pangea before I pecked my way out of the cosmic egg like a miner trapped deep in the heart of the motherlode that came down on me like an avalanche when things began to fall apart. Express yourself. Like genetic variations in the shapes of dinosaurs adapting like South America to its new independence from the establishment. Like a coal miner’s canary in a tunnel. Like bannas say I’m yellow with sunspots. Make art. Make love. Make a mess of your life with taste and style. Put on an exhibition of your palettes. Go Japanese about the way you arrange your dry paint-caked brushes in no-name brand enameled coffee cans. Write like a poet who knows he’s doomed to die tragically old and full of a fetal sweetness of things being born in autumn like the karmic apples of his next life. One, for Sleeping Beauty. One to win Helen. One to seduce Eve. And one because it contains the seeds of sacred syllables and symbolizes Q, the letter that stood for poets in the Beth Luis Nion Druidic Tree Alphabet because we’re always supposed to be asking why, and all the why questions begin with Q in Latin. Q’s an apple-tree. And as any Druid will tell you. Once and a while it’s good to eat one of your own. So be a windfall. Apples or skulls. Shepherd moons and solar systems. Dumb blind flint-knapped asteroids in their planetary middens. Express yourself. Like the Burgess Shale. Like the Grand Banks just off the continental shelf where things drop off your body and your mind and it gets too deep for any anchor to dare to pull you down. Intimidate your chains with the insurmountable challenge of your freedom. And if you’re having coffee and a spliff with death in Aleppo as often as you say you do, why waste your death on trivia, and blow up a highschool, when you could take advantage, even by a reflected glory, not what you know but who in your case, of the incredible power and freedom to take up any lost cause you want, like yourself, for example, and declaring a holy war on yourself, have nothing but a few badly defended mirages to lose? Or you could go on liberating the windmills of your mind with blood, sweat, and tears in Jerusalem without having the slightest clue about whose side your on. And don’t tell me you’re on all sides at once to dodge the bullet because that just means someone’s going to have to go to the extra expense of putting a few more firing squads on the night shift. And you’re the only one of them that can show some compassion toward yourself like a blank and a cigarette and a blindfold.

I love you, little brother. Take the mask off. Put this on. It’s Kevlar. It was Azazel's idea.

PATRICK WHITE

ENLIGHTENMENT ISN'T LUMPY

ENLIGHTENMENT ISN’T LUMPY

Enlightenment isn’t lumpy

even if sometimes you’ve got your heart

stuck in your throat

like a bird in a chimney

warming up like a phoenix

to go the way of the sumac leaves

and the ghosts of smoke

on the pyres of the sky burials

of the Canada geese.

Just because November

can’t feel its pulse

and the garden snakes are nesting

like a sloppy knot of wavelengths

deep in the cold heartwood

of a rootless tree that can feel

the brutal chill of serpent fire

running up its spine like a lightning rod

doesn’t mean enlightenment’s a placebo

you have to keep away from the kids.

It’s real enough to be unattainable

without disrespecting the integrity

of the picture plane.

It hides out in the open

where no one ever thinks to look.

The simpler it gets

the bigger the book you need to write

in order to conclude ambiguously

you do and you don’t not understand it.

Say not two

and all is well.

And mean it deeper than you can say it

so that pain doesn’t adulterate the child

that’s trying to transcend it

by hanging on to the lifelines

of his fire-proof constellations

like the kites of distant stars burning in the wind.

Enlightenment doesn’t care

if you’ve lost your integrity.

Your absence of self-respect

for someone who isn’t there

is a rare opportunity

to uphold the dignity

of stars and rivers and trees.

Enlightenment’s just the blossom.

It’s not the fruit

of what there is yet to be.

The smell of autumn

in a windfall of apples

cradled like small planets in your arms.

Enlightenment isn’t salvation from pain.

It’s an invitation to forsake yourself

in the name of nothing you can explain.

The blossom let’s go to make room for the fruit.

The perfumes of the spring give way

to the aromas of decay.

But they’re both sweet

because there’s nothing about either of them

that’s everlasting.

It may be an old root.

But it blossoms in the spring.

It may be a dead branch

but the nightbird stops to sing.

And the full moon shines

like a skull full of signs

above its dark abundance.

Enlightenment isn’t out of the reach of anyone

because it’s got infinitely long arms

and puts the stars at your fingertips

and says play what you want

as long as it’s something

we all can dance to

on our way to the grave

like fireflies in the wake of a thunderstorm.

Enlightenment doesn’t take life too seriously

even when it makes a tantrum

of its elemental innocence

and goes supernova.

Deep in the nuclear core of its heart

it’s creatively playful on a cosmic scale.

The darkest inspiration

of its genius for making

an art of its existence

is life.

Simple and beautiful

as the laughter of children

collecting sea shells on the moon.

Even when you’re severely lost

enlightenment doesn’t hand you a flashlight

and say go look for your mind

like the holy grail in a sacred wood.

It deepens your solitude.

It blows the candle out

until you emerge like a star

from the profusion of your own darkness

and stand in the doorway

of your own shining

amazed by what you can see

when enlightenment isn’t blinding.

PATRICK WHITE

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