BRUTAL BLUE

BRUTAL BLUE

Brutal blue.

Deadly nightshade.

The heritage streetlamps coming on,

blooming without petals.

In the gloaming, lovely word,

the winter sky acts as if

it’s never even heard of us

and things do not so much appear

as emerge.

Brake-light poppies in the parking lots.

Musical chairs for cop cars and ambulances.

Afflictions of concrete.

The asphalt backs a dark horse.

It sweats light

that someone’s made a liar out of

from Jersey Joe’s Pizza Parlour,

the Giant Tiger department store,

and smeared like lipstick across a mirror

as if to say, yes, there was a kiss

but I didn’t mean it.

Separation where there should be love.

Miscarriages among the roses

bleeding on bedsheets from their eyes.

I’m one small town away from nowhere.

My heart on ice

as if it had just been pulled out of a river

like Rasputin, a northern pike,

an overturned boater.

My words curl in my mouth

like the scrolls of the gnostic leaves

and the bitter cold air

is trying to pierce my nostrils

and insert Venus

burning ferociously in the west

like a nose-ring

I’ll never be able to get out again.

Commotion and gaggle of geese on the ground

but high over head

lost in the glare of the light pollution

the wild ones

are haunting their way through my poems.

PATRICK WHITE

THESE WORDS TURN HOMEWARD

THESE WORDS TURN HOMEWARD

These words turn homeward

toward you, my dark wood,

because of all assignations of the night

you are West, you are dream and secret

you, deeper than jewels, sweeter

than the taste of stars

in the eyes of wounded black berries.

You, longing and lucidity,

singing in the last of the shadows

of the sacred trees for the unattainable

that summons me to you.

Endless, the farewell, endless

the dusk the nightbirds follow

after the swallows

have danced for the stars

in an aerial display of their own.

You, my star field, my wildflower,

whose skin is the skin of lunar waterlilies

and the tide at the tips of my fingers.

My new moon, my despair,

my solitude, my silence, my absence

which among these thousand lonely lakes

has looked upon you and seen

as I have seen in your incomprehensible eyes

how unfathomable they are to themselves

in your depths, your death,

the fullness of your abiding evanescence.

the quiet intimacies

that have just crept up on me

over these intervening years

that have done nothing

but linger in the moment

as if you would always be there

and could be found nowhere else

but now forever in this doorway

this broken window into my heart

to let go of

over and over and over again

like the rain, this stone, that leaf,

the wraith of your breath

hovering like a thin autumn mist

always at a distance over the harvested fields.

O diminished one, subtle one, free,

how is it you can inspire me still

though your ashes were given back to the stars

like a message for their eyes only

so many years ago that time itself

has upgraded all my starmaps

and made you alone, far one, bright one,

this lonely holy road that’s walking me home

as if my final destination, like yours, like you

were everywhere in whatever direction I turn

to ask the next star, where you’ve gone,

has it seen you, has it heard

was it too soon, was it too early

is it too late, too perilous, too absurd

for the morning to return you

like a singing bird to a green bough

to the dead branch that lost the moon

like its only blossom

on the rootless tree

that it took you from

when it took you from me?

PATRICK WHITE

IT'S CHARGED WITH MY BROTHER'S KARMA HE SAID

IT’S CHARGED WITH MY BROTHER’S KARMA HE SAID

It’s charged with my brother’s karma he said

as he broke the shotgun

like the trunk of a young ironwood

and looked inside as if he

fully expected to surprise something funny

going on behind his back in both barrels

then plunked it down on the table

as if he were laying down

hard cold cash for something.

He took his life with it.

I’ll do the same when my time comes.

And how will you know when that will be? I asked

as he took a long merciless sip of Olde Crow Whiskey.

If you got to ask you’d pass right by it

even if I told you where it’s at.

And that was that

as the bottle thumped down on the table

like an adamant gavel.

I didn’t press the point.

I didn’t ask for a starmap.

I let it rest like most of his ancestors

in a cemetery up near Northbrook

Highway 7 runs through

on your way to Peterborough

past Tweed where Elvis Presley lives.

Earlier in the day I had walked

among the gravestones

of two tribal backwoods families

prodigiously askew and fabulously lonely

sinking into the long wet-haired disorderly grass

indecently green for this time of year,

unkempt dandelions and rusty Indian paintbrush

the colour of cars in the backfields of l950

lying side by side

like angry chequers swept off the board

not one in ten of which

died a natural death.

Hangings, suicides, tragic accidents,

unsolved murders

that everyone’s related to

for miles around in the smokey grey woods

watching from a distance,

bodies hanging from barn rafters,

crushed under overturned tractors,

blood spatter on the bedroom walls

that had seen them conceived and born

and a haemorrhage like the scattered petals

of a single red rose left on the mattress

when the time came to know what hour it was.

I wanted to ask him

but I didn’t want to tread on sacred ground,

as a rosary of Canada geese passed south

appearing through the kitchen window

like the flint knappings of a stone arrow

November was carving high over head.

When it came time for him to depart

did he put the shotgun up to his mouth

or his heart?

PATRICK WHITE

I LEFT THE SCENE BECAUSE

I LEFT THE SCENE BECAUSE

I left the scene because after long discipline

and the labour of many mirrors

I wanted to get the careerism out of my poetry

and return to the unbrokered relationship

I had with the muse who had me

when I was sixteen sitting

precipitously on Heartbreak Hill

not caring whether the stars knew

I was there or not

because it was more than enough that they were.

I wanted to end my apprenticeship to literary owls

editors publishers agents poet-tasters court-jesters

and the quarterly reviews of the gleemen

who made a mockery of the blood sacrifices

they watered down like Druids

that had never taken a life

in the name of anything that ever mattered

to the talented or untalented alike.

I wanted to get away from the merry-go-rounds

who made a hobby-horse of Pegasus

and kept asking me

how many books I had published now

though it was doubtful they’d even read one

all the way through

and the only answer I could give them

was I was the fucking Library of Alexandria.

Now watch me burn it to the ground.

I don’t think it’s true you always kill the thing you love

but I knew too many who had buried themselves in books

to prove they did

while those they loved

went right on living without them.

I left the scene because

when I wrote

too many doctorates

tried to crawl up into the womb

to monitor the birth of the baby

by prying its petals open

before it was due to be born.

Because the waters of life

like the wellsprings of Parnassus

in Macedonia

before Helicon in Boeotian Greece

switched to hippocrene

can’t be approached like a fish farm.

Because I’m from B.C.

and I know you have to be willing to leap up stream

with the wisdom and grace and courage

of a wild salmon

through a gauntlet of real grizzlies

if you want to be summoned by the ancient mystery

to the sacred pools of your own creativity

where everything begins and ends

like the waterclocks of inspiration

generation after generation.

I left the scene because

too many periodicals were coming on

like voice coaches to the nightingales

who submitted their vocals

to the editorial policies

of peacocks who sang a lot worse than they did.

I left the scene because

you can’t live like a maggot

and write like a butterfly

and even if you can ‘t find

much that’s noble about your calling anymore

it’s still not an investment portfolio

with stocks in Poetry Chicago.

I liked the awards I won.

I liked the books I published

without exception.

I liked the provincial and federal writing grants.

I liked the reading fees

such as the one I’m getting here tonight.

I liked the dinner I had with Max.

I liked the planes and the cars

the private homes

the reasonable hotels

that people put me in or on

and I liked the way people

well-meaning enough

would lie to me enthusiastically

about how my name would last forever

as long as there was a Canadian literature

that could stand up to the weather.

I liked the attention

and needed it

and I never met an audience

I didn’t like

if they’d let me.

I liked the radio interviews

with big studio dressing rooms

with cosmetically lit mirrors for my voice

but I’m still more than a little ambivalent

about the visual effects

they laced my voice with like acid

to make the documentaries

more interesting than my life.

I liked the artists who did the poster-poems

for most of the poetry readings in Ottawa for free for years

and the back up guitarists

like the Roddy Elias Jazz Trio

and this triune expression of musical experience

that’s coming up shortly behind me here.

I liked the intelligently generous restauranteurs

who were gracious enough

to give me a chance to read above

the sounds of falling spoons and crashing plates.

I liked the man who passed the hat

at the end of every reading

like a collection plate

that made me feel

if I stood at this pulpit long enough

I’d get to be the leader of a church.

I liked the losing and the finding and the search

for inspiration among the covens

and the choirs of fallen angels

who showed me all the things you can do with fire

that have nothing to do with global warming

which isn’t a function of natural desire.

I liked sitting alone on a runway in Terrace

on a cross country book tour

surrounded by mountains and ice

wondering how anything could gain enough altitude

without being stoned out of its mind

to avoid a collision with the peak moments of your life

like a decision that isn’t yours to make

and you’re not quite sure

whether you’re going to die or not

nor for whose sake

or in the name of what

when you remember

and this is your last best hope

you’re an integral part of Canadian Literature

and you’re going to live forever

as long as you can clear the Rockies and the weather

and get your landing gear up in time

like a duck flying over a duck blind.

I liked the vegetarian hosts

who let me smoke at some readings

because they said they liked my work so well

they didn’t have the heart

to make a demon like me

go through nicotine withdrawal

in the name of art

and gave me the breathing space

I need as a poet

to read my poetry

though I took great care

not to blow the smoke in their face.

I liked the way I was adopted

by exiles in the capitol of the country

I was born into like a changeling

by the Arabs and Chileans.

I liked the special connections I had

to Calabria and Arezzo.

I liked editing a poetry magazine.

I liked publishing other people’s poetry books.

I liked having a talk-show

and being an artificial life support system

to prevent guests from inhaling too much dead air

so they could talk live on the radio.

I liked pulling into the Canadian Tire Gas Bar

on highway 7 just before midnight

and being recognized

three years after I quit broadcasting

by the sound of my voice alone

by an overly enthusiastic gas-jockey

who thought I was some kind of big shot

and I wanted to say hey, buddy,

do yourself a big favour

and get a life of your own

because I like being heard

but that doesn’t always mean

I’m worth listening to

or that the noise I make

is many more wavelengths longer than yours.

Or the acoustics of your dick

are merely the hollow echo

of mine that roars by comparison.

Anyone can wake the valley up

with a bull horn.

But it takes a rooster with real class

to crow softly,

knowing the rose likes to sleep in.

I liked it all.

The Blue Gardenia, The Wildflower,

the aging nightowls of L’Hibou,

the legends of Mandrex and alcohol

that made the mice feel farcical.

I liked having as many detractors as I did friends.

I liked being asked to be poet laureate

and have a Jewish sister insist upon it

after sticking up for the Palestinians

and being reviewed

as the White Ayatollah of Ottawa

in the Ottawa Citizen

when in fact

I thought of myself

as a kind of throw back to Mephistopheles

with a host of demi-gods

and black-hearted magicians for friends.

I liked the wild witchy beauty of the women

who loved me like a finishing school

for fucked-up creative females

and took the madness I embodied to heart

and made it their own

to give themselves a good start in art

with my blessing.

And they liked the way that was o.k. with me.

Anything for poetry.

Even the empty doorway

they left me to remember them by.

And I do.

Gratefully.

For having enriched my solitude immeasurably.

But for all that I liked roosting

with the crows and peacocks

the swans and the larks

the sparrows and nightingales and seagulls

in the sacred groves of poetry

I couldn’t get this cosmic hiss out of my head

this white noise

this multiversal whisper

from the afterbirth of creation

that kept suggesting

there was no point in making a Big Bang

if it didn’t turn into a universe.

So I looked for space.

I looked for time.

I returned to my potential

I looked for cheap rent

on a small town apartment

where I could spill paint on the floor

and write myself to death

without anyone coming to the door

to tell me how much I had to offer other people

though I wasn’t aware of the fact that they’d even asked.

I wanted to take a bath in my own grave

alone with the moon by an unnamed lake

to renew my innocence

among the scarecrows and voodoo dolls

I refeathered like a phoenix in the fall

with burning leaves of sumac

on the last pyre I had to spend

on getting closer to the stars than I’ve ever been.

I left the scene because

longing and silence and solitude

are the three water birds I collaborate with the most

when I want to say what’s in my heart.

I left the scene because

only the night and the hills

and the wind and the fields

and the wildflowers whose names

are poems in and of themselves

and the six thousand unattainable stars

that I aspire to like women I’ll never have,

though they’re happy enough

to turn themselves out like muses

who like to marry men on death row,

reminded me of how

refreshingly insignificant I am

to anything that’s going on with them

like a big-hearted, good-natured ghost

they feel free enough to call upon

any time they want

and that’s what they like about me the most.

PATRICK WHITE

TEN PAGES, LITTLE BROTHER

TEN PAGES, LITTLE BROTHER

Ten pages, little brother,

for your edification

and our mutual illumination

but I look forward to the night

when I think of you

and what you’re doing to yourself

and it’s a haiku.

PATRICK WHITE

NO SLEEP AGAIN TONIGHT

NO SLEEP AGAIN TONIGHT

No sleep again tonight.

Not haunted by anyone.

Not troubled by love

or the lack thereof.

Nevertheless

stuck by pins like a voodoo doll

in the hands of a spiteful lepidopterist.

By poisonous flying insects of insight

like a fire in a jungle at night.

Indigestible menus of life

that just don’t sit right in my belly.

Butterflies and starmaps.

I’m an experimental lightbulb

with a six million volt lightning filament

in Nikola Tesla’s lab.

I’m an over-reactive inner core nuclear meltdown

of a demonic hydroelectric plant

overdoing my afterlife

trying to put the fires of hell out

with heavy water that turns to steam

whenever I try to walk on it.

Lights off.

Head on the pillow.

Gas pipes bang and crack.

Whump of car doors

slamming outside

connecting with a right to the ribs

like the corpse of a heavy body bag

that’s just had the wind knocked out of it.

Snap. Whump.

My pillowcase

Deploying like a parachute

that’s candled like an exclamation mark.

This is freefall.

This is a comet

this is a coma

this is a comma

that’s been igniting dry ice all day

but doesn’t know how to turn the lights out.

This is insane.

This is like sharing your waterbed

with an anaconda,

your coiled box spring

upholstered by summer thunderheads

with a snakepit

performing a fertility lap dance for lightning.

This is a waking wet dream

without a succubus.

When I crawled into bed

my two eyes had the following

of a soporific colon with popular sex appeal

but now I look at the clock

forty-five minutes later

than it used to be

and all I can see

are the fang marks my eyes left

between three digital numbers

that look as if the poison

is beginning to take effect.

And all I can do

as they slip off into never never land

is envy their toxicity

as I o.d. on my own brain activity

like a crackhead that hasn’t lost consciousness

since the early eighties went punk

The medium isn’t up to the message.

But with the snake-eyed luck

of the insomniac I’ve become

they’ll kill the medium

but not the messenger.

Rosy shades of champagne in the morning

on heritage field stone bank fronts

with ghastly logos of fire-engine red

and a sky growing bluer

than Botticelli by the moment

the harder I try not abhor the dawn

the brighter it gets

and the more I take it personally.

I hate the fucking Renaissance.

Ghosts have their graves to go to.

Vampires their blood banks.

Blind star-nosed moles

don’t suffer in daylight

the way I do.

Who shows up for the nightshift

at the crack of dawn?

False dawn.

Fraudulent candle.

Artificial light on a pot plant

trying to get some z’s in the closet.

The sun shines at midnight here.

It crowds the moon out.

It elbows its way like a cuckoo’s egg

into the corners of your eyes

and just sits there

like a lump on the ecliptic

making up alibis

in the face of the conspiracy theorists

who see plots hatching out everywhere

for world domination by the Illuminati.

Used to sleep like the dead.

My head on the pillow.

Gone.

Not even a dream for years.

Dark, dark, dark,

they all go into the dark blank oblivion

of being no one’s sleep

under so many eyelids

and they sleep like Rilke in the death

he so seductively preferred to life

as the greater intensity of the two

but from this wide-eyed point of view

who can blame him

and as far as I’m irritably concerned

any immediate immensity

that could consume me right now would do.

Wu shi. No mindedness.

I’m trying to throw midnight oil

on my troubled theta waves

to calm my oceanic consciousness

of being lost on the moon

in the Sea of Tranquility

without any way to drown.

I’m doing what the Buddha did

with less effort

thinking what isn’t thought

seeing what isn’t sight

hearing what isn’t heard

my whole head blurred

in a cloud of unknowing

and my bodymind sitting here

bolt upright at my desk

like a lightning rod

giving the sky the finger

attending without attention to this.

Sick of being a nightwatchman

and a sleepwalker by day

as acutely aware as Methuselah

that time is a repeating decimal.

Sick of being a first magnitude star

paled like a wall flower by the sun

a bloodshot albino leper streetlamp

with its third eye perpetually open

in a diurnal caste system

that puts too much emphasis

on enlightenment

but isn’t sage enough

to know when to shut it down.

Sick of being singled out

for the eyes in the back of my head

by the dream people

like the thirteenth hour

the thirteenth month

the tristadecaphobic floor

of the thirteenth house of a zodiac

where the elevator never stops

on its way up or down

like a third equinox of the sun

the rest of the family doesn’t talk about

to keep one eye on things

like a Cyclops with tunnel vision

and half a sleeping pill

to do the job of more opioids

than you could bleed

even under interrogation

from an entire Afghani poppy field.

Bright, bright, bright,

they all go into the light

but the rest I’m up for

looks more like a re-run

of the simulcast

of a saturnalian white night

in a blizzard of shattered glass

that makes the sound

of one Zen chandelier

break dancing in an ice storm.

Even the mirrors are noisy.

And if a brilliant insight

ever had a down time

this has got to be it,

one of those anti-eureka moments

when your eyes just don’t give a shit

if you had a fulcrum

and a lever long enough

you could move it off the dock.

I’m bushed. I’m whacked.

I’m wiped. I’m wired.

I’m so fucking tired

tar looks overactive to me

and the pyramids have a.d.d.

Nothing works.

The sun’s setting fire

to all my starmaps

and even the fireflies

have been cryonically frozen

like the genome of a new ice age.

A crackhouse in downtown L.A.

during a police raid

caught in a brush fire

in the middle of a 7.8 earthquake

on a digital Richter scale

gets more sleep than I do.

Or a drug cartel with attitude.

Or a hive of killer bees,

oversensitive to the sound

of anything it can swarm

like a shopping mall

a bus stop

a subway

a dairy cow

a classroom

a neighbourhood

a psyche

a toilet seat

a third world country

like riot police on Wall Street.

PATRICK WHITE

LAST TOKE OF THE NIGHT

LAST TOKE OF THE NIGHT

Last toke of the night.

Last cigarette.

Last coffee.

Thinks with his kind of luck

they’ll put a no smoking sign behind him

while he’s blindfolded

in front of a firing squad.

He takes the garbage out

at three in the morning,

puts his one seaweed green plastic bag

next to five others

from the insurance brokerage downstairs

leaning up against a one-eyed parking meter.

Desolate small town November streets.

The red coat Scotiabank

glares at him like a U-boat in Halifax Harbour.

One drunk moving from door way to doorway

like a waterclock from bucket to bucket

as if they were all connected in his mind somehow

in series, not parallel.

Abandoned things, leafless trees,

a bad hair day for the flowers

down in the dumps

with their municipally rustic whiskey barrels.

He remembers learning several summers ago

if you put the flame of a zippo

under the petals of the petunias

they change colour better than a mood ring

and more melodramatically than a rejected adolescent.

Deep Persian blues

freaked with celestial Chinese greens

that almost made him believe at the time

that a petunia must have been a peacock in another life.

Waste, litter, leaves, traffic lights

swaying in the wind

like a trainman with a lantern down the line

trying to slow things they have no effect upon down.

Stop. Go. Pause.

The magic is gone.

Nothing moves the way it should.

The train starts mourning from a long way off

like a dog that’s lost its master.

Space is laid out like a Nazdac runway

with omnidirectional perspective

but no one’s taxied up to the tower yet

to ask for permission to take off.

He looks up.

Jupiter.

Just past zenith, southwest

of the Alley Cats Bowling sign and gym.

He lives above and one apartment down

from the narrow tunnel into the courtyard

of the old coach house where the horse culture of Perth

used to stable their overexuberant buggies.

Past the gold and soot coloured mailboxes

that look like they’ve been in a plane crash

and were waiting to be reassembled

as soon as the mailman can find the flight recorder

in the right black box.

Through three doors

up one worn flight of stairs

through an unpainted veneer and cardboard door

down a long haul past a gas furnace and a coatrack

he returns to his private chaos

nebulous with insomnia

as the counter-intuitive nemesis

of overexhaustion and the last of the good bud.

Last toke of the night.

Last cigarette.

Last coffee.

Over and over and over again

like a mantra looking for oblivion.

Nada. Nada. Not enlightenment.

He thinks of an Irish bank teller he likes

because she scares and excites him

with the possibility of her beauty and darkness.

He looks at last year’s masterpiece

propped up in the silence above his desk

but one look at his eyes

and it’s said all it’s going to say to him tonight.

Which leaves the lamps for late night conversation

but they’re about as scintillating as the coma he’s in.

The air in the room

one long pregnant pause

before the crack of dawn or doom

or whichever comes first,

he watches his mind like landfill

for any sign of his corpse.

The darkened see-through coffin of his aquarium

worthy of Napoleon or Lenin lying in state

to see the lineaments of greatness stone cold dead

where his goldfish recently died

like the Bolshoi Ballet or a comet

with an urgent dispatch for the sun

who killed the messenger as soon as it arrived.

He would have buried him at sea

for the sailor he was

but all he had was a toilet at the time

and no flag to wrap him in but cellophane.

No twenty-one gun salute.

Just the salvo of a thin gas chimney pipe

warming up like shallow heavy metal.

The indignity at the end always hurts worse

than the broken promise of a false start

but such is life he tells himself

without really knowing what he’s agreeing to.

PATRICK WHITE