THERE WAS NOTHING EVER TO FORGIVE YOU FOR

THERE WAS NOTHING EVER TO FORGIVE YOU FOR

There was nothing ever to forgive you for

I’d say to you now if you were still alive.

Pain doesn’t maintain an agent,

though as many who have lived

have been named as perpetrators;

it just occurs

like happiness just happens

like a stroke of luck, a touch of grace

in an astronomical lottery of famished chances.

Voices arise in my head to address you

in the immensities of time and sorrow

like spokesmen for my heart

and another part of me

listens from the audience to this play

that’s been going on for light years without you.

I suspect I’m still trying to perfect the way I loved you

out of force of habit, knowing how

redundant and absurd that is

long after the play closed

and the plaster cherubs

on the Ionian cornices of the theatre

were buried in the rubble

along with the comic and tragic masks

that shed their petals when the lights went off

and everyone was left face to face with themselves.

You have drifted in and out of my poems for years

like a curtain at an open window

in an abandoned house,

like blue smoke from an autumn fire,

the fragrance of the bath you draw from the stars

and sweeten with the salts of lunar wildflowers

whenever you want to renew your virginity

like the kings’ mistress

stepping out of the sea

like some Renaissance Venus

covering her sex up with a serpentine lock of hair.

You’re the sparrow on the finger of Catullus’ lover

except now you can only make it as far

as my windowsill

though I leave everything open to you

to come and go as you please and must.

No illusory skies. No broken necks.

No more finger-stroking the soft walnut of a bird’s head

like a lost locket full of grief,

like a small lamp that can’t grant anymore wishes

however you caress it.

Ah, the genie’s out mingling with the Milky Way

like all unencompassed spirits of the night,

like dead souls in the bodies of Canada geese

heading southwest

though their echoes are veering northeast

as if their homeless ghosts

had a place and mind of their own,

an airy nothingness

without a local habitation or a name.

In my view of the world as picture-music

in an expanding universe with its foot to the floor

on a pedal of dark energy

the vision’s always too big

for any frame or stage or star map

you bring to it to try and express

where things are improbably at now.

We were young together for awhile

and we sought to embrace the world

and everything in it

even if it meant kissing the dead on the forehead

to wake them up gently from their long dream

of flying in formation with Canada geese,

though it never did.

I tried it on you more than once.

I kissed every bead on a rosary of prophetic skulls.

And still to this day no one answers, no one hears.

I tried to scry the future

in the crystal balls of my tears

but all I ever saw was the same old moon,

the same old stars that crossed us off

their birthday guest list

like a calendar of total eclipses

that had already taken place.

And I knew the future was far behind us.

And your early death could only make you more beautiful

as the years wore out their threadbare flying carpets

and those rare bright nocturnal spirits of life

you were meant to meet and fall in love with

like the heart loves its bloodstream

like a waterclock loves the passage of time

when it’s full to overbrimming

with water on the moon

grow rarer and further apart

like stars on the skin of our cosmic enlargements.

Just like this open window

that never lets eternity become a barrier to the dead.

I’ve never closed the curtains on the play.

I’ve never drawn a veil over

the fountains and the waterfalls

the wetlands and rapids of my mindstream

and said to the lady of the lake

in her garment of mist

this is live water

and that water’s dead

as if there were a wave of difference

between the one that carries forth

and the one that carries away.

The cloud and the snow on the mountaintop

both speak the same language,

share the same mother-tongue

as does the fog in the valley

the ice, the rain, the dew,

as if what’s false about the living

were true of the dead as well,

everything sublime, everything trivial.

Hydra-headed water shapeshifting

through our hands

like the desert sands of an hourglass

that dump the pyramid

and finally get out of the box.

Lunar landscapes

with transmogrifying mindstreams

that apply themselves like water

to mending gardens on the moon

while death waits like a stranger at the gate

to commend you on the green thumb

that’s apparent in your choice of wildflowers.

I can still feel you bend time

like the body of a guitar

when you’re around me

trying to tune the spider webs

in the corner of the room I write in

to your cosmic whole note of silence.

And just as you were a muse of mine in life

and I drew your intoxicating waters

deeply from the well

and we walked under the stars awhile

without caring where we were going

so even in death

I can feel you come to the dead branch sometimes

like inspiration to a night bird’s heart

when it doesn’t really matter

if anyone answers or not

because you flower like longing

in the roots of my solitude

and the moon blossoms

and my poems unfold like leaves.

PATRICK WHITE

FULL MOON BEHIND THE BROKEN FEMUR OF A JACK PINE

FULL MOON BEHIND THE BROKEN FEMUR OF A JACK PINE

Full moon behind the broken femur of a jack pine

shattered by the wind on the ridge of the hill,

its pagoda of boughs, nothing but a lean-to now

for deer mice, fox, rabbit, groundhogs.

Old manuscripts of rock striated and stacked

by retreating glaciers

washing their hands of themselves.

The hill has never known a messiah

and the glaciers wrote for themselves.

The mast of the moon boat wrecked,

The rectal stake of Vlad the Impaler.

The axis of the world for the auto de fe

of some future heretic

with a penchant for the tragic.

No culpability in the event.

Hawk with an injured wing,

molar, stalagmite, Cinderella

sweeping up the pieces of a broken chandelier

so she won’t cut her feet on the stars.

This tree talked to God.

This tree broke like an arrow

to make a truce with the wind.

Detonations of juniper and red ground willow,

splashes of tears and blood

going off like improvised explosive devices

in a mine-field covered in snow.

This tree was caught in a war-zone.

This tree is trying to flag a fighter back on deck.

This tree sailed out and met the French at Trafalgar.

This tree is a seasoned cannoneer

without a leg to stand on.

This tree is the capital A of a sacred alphabet.

The moon rises and shrinks from apricot

to blue-white toward zenith

and somehow metaphors

run off the back of the silence here

like water off a water bird

as a fractured pine

puts its finger up to my lips

and says shhhhhhh

there’s nothing that can be said

that’s going to make me whole again.

It’s not me that you’re trying to mend.

The wind shudders

with a bleak chill it doesn’t recognize

like a power surge up its spine

as a cult of bats sweep the air helter skelter

like lunar butterflies with teeth.

The brutal clarity of broken things in the wild,

beautiful beyond compare

with anyone’s reflexive remedies,

a wound more sublime

than the whole and the healed

among these groves that surround the hill

like devotees at Stonehenge

pouring blood libations

over the dolmen of a Druid

talking in tree language to the full moon

about things that haven’t happened yet

and the things that have.

PATRICK WHITE

SOME PEOPLE LIKE TO TAKE A WATER DROPLET

SOME PEOPLE LIKE TO TAKE A WATER DROPLET

Some people like to take a water droplet

and turn it into a haiku.

Some people like to write

like the loose thread

of a quick-witted alpine stream

trying to unravel the mountain all the way down

with dazzle and flash.

But when I shoot my mouth off

about what I don’t know about nightingales

it always comes out ice-hot stars

above a rush of northern rivers,

the Mackenzie, the Fraser, the Thompson

and when I want to risk

my cowboy B.C. French in public,

the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Some people like to weave their mindstreams

into lakes with their third eyes open

to the flight of the white clouds

and the sky that doesn’t inhibit them,

but me I like to flow and fall and crush

swell and fork, shift, shape, loop, swerve,

destroy, nourish, and change course

like the Ottawa or the Skeena

in the May spring run off

when the ice floes and weight-lifting waters

are flexing their muscles

in powerfully sculpted anthracite and jade.

A river, yes, blackwater and white alike;

what could be more

quintessentially Canadian than that?

A river as inhospitable and bleak as the Arctic

toward life in its beginnings,

and still as wild and dangerous as Hell’s Gate

as it approaches the sea

after many perils and epiphanies.

I am the sorcerer’s apprentice

when it comes to rivers

but I like to go with the flow, the power, the depth

the cosmic expansion of their homelessness,

the cataracts and wetlands of their manic mood swings,

the way they uproot and sustain,

carve traffic islands out of granite

and tear down bridges in their path

and then slow down mellifluously

to let a doe come out of the woods to drink

from the reflection of the way the water sees her.

I give the orange spruce root rot in rusty shallows

and strip the bark from defrocked trees

the herons nest in like a brain trust.

Grizzly, moose, cougar, wolf,

elk, deer, beaver, mink and muskrat,

eagle, loon, drake and Canada goose,

what totem of star mud

has not mingled its blood in my flowing,

what stars have not tingled on my skin

like butterflies landing on single sunlit hairs,

what tribes have not sat around their fires

while I flint-knapped the moonlight

into radiant silver spears

as the waves made small music

like a background theme of silence?

I don’t need to know where I’m going.

I can be Kelsey, Thompson, or La Verendrye,

and keep a journal of where I’ve been

and make rough sketches of what I’ve seen

because flowing freehand isn’t a point

it’s a destination that’s always on the move

shooting the rapids of the life line

in the palm of your hand

as if life were precious enough to risk it all

to see how far you had to go

to flow off the edge of a starmap that doesn’t know.

Clash, dash, swirl and recover,

turn, counter-turn, stand

I like to waltz my way out of knots and nooses

like an Horatian ode in the glands of a Romantic poet.

I like to boost the torque of my whirlpools and currents

and open up the throttle

on the straightaways of cobbled river stones

as if I had a big four-stroke between my knees.

Underwhelm the birch groves before the beavers do,

tear the cedars out like molars,

turn whole villages into houseboats

and take my wrath out on the petty roads

that whine like potholes and puddles

if it so much as even rains.

All weak threads of ancillary streams

are gathered up into the strong ropes

of northern rivers with enough spine and backbone

to have all their chakras open

like the lunar and the solar filaments of serpent-fire.

My poems taste of stone and glacier,

unnamed valleys where the red-tailed hawks

have never set eyes on a human

and the sound of a voice

leaves the mountains speechless,

not knowing what language to echo.

Roil, roll, tumble, and spume,

lost in a froth of creative chaos

that brings forth rainbows and stars

and auroral veils of water and light

to mystify the message in the medium

by frustrating the logic of syntax

in the scintillant radiance

of counter-intuitive metaphors

that relate in myriad family ways

like salmon swimming upstream

summoned out of the spontaneity of the past

against the flow of the timely waterclocks

up to the sacred pools of birth and death

to die like old moons in the arms of the new.

I wreck whole forests like the Spanish Armada.

People run to me like a lifeboat

for shelter and sanctuary from the fire.

A northern river is the jugular of a snow dragon

with its wings spread as wide as Canada

breathing fire like two year old red oak

in a Napoleon airtight with a see through window

and a ten inch Selkirk chimney

that looks like it were cast out of moonlight

instead of polished aluminum

on a cold clear winter night in the country.

A poem should not mean or be

but do something to you like Vancouver,

rip off that life raft you’ve moored yourself to

like a running shoe tied up at a dock

and throwing it down like a gauntlet at your bare feet

see if you can learn to sink or swim for yourself

or, at least, walk on stars,

or pull the thorns of crescent moons

you’re bound to step on along the way

out of your heels with your teeth

like a wolf pulls a porcupine quill from its paw

with barely a whimper of regret.

Sometimes you’ve got to bite the bullet

to get it out.

But a river’s like a barbed arrowhead

and it’s better to push it all the way through

than it is to let it tear at your flesh

like a bobcat on its way out of the bag.

It’s not a good idea when you’re in a northern bar

to start arm wrestling

with drunken men who build dams for a living

but you can get away with it

if you’re a river and not a highway,

because they of all people

know your potential for destruction

when you’re backed up

and there’s no other way out

except straight through a brick wall.

El Toro!

And there’s a crack

in the cement cape of the matador

that taunted the broad-shouldered bulls of the river

like a cattle prod in their stalls,

and a horn through his gored heart.

Torrent, rage, acquiesce, and chill out,

yes, a northern Canadian river

will do just fine as a similitude

for the way I like to write,

a neural connection to the planet,

a water root of dendritic black matter,

the circuitous blossoming

of wild irises and quaking aspen groves

all along the great water ways of life.

And as for inspiration

who needs more than the coming and going

of the waterbirds

to learn how to master words

as if they were as free to be what they are

as I am?

PATRICK WHITE

THE FLOWERLESS NIGHT RAIN OF LATE NOVEMBER

THE FLOWERLESS NIGHT RAIN OF LATE NOVEMBER

The flowerless night rain of late November,

radiant in the window screen

of the Smokin’ Eagles hamburger pitstop trailer

closed for the season,

a loom of jewels

weaving a flying carpet of water

out of the warp and woof of its tears

as if it too had somewhere urgent to go

at this migratory time of year.

Rain on the bushes in the flooded fields

that have rendered what they had to yield,

cattle corn, mustard, purple loosestrife,

pasture for the cow the sheep the horse

and here and there llamas and apathetic buffalo,

stony midwives as brusque as Scotch thistles

disposing of the afterbirth of stillborn lambs

like a sky burial for the turkey-vultures

that circle like an aerial ballet of banshees

high and relentless overhead

for the mother to stop nudging the dead.

Roadkill from their point of view,

not making a waste of death,

and a reminder to me that life’s

got no special feelings for anyone.

And yet despite what the Zen master said

about not trying to stuff

the impersonal secret of the universe

into your tiny sentimental heart

how could you fail not to

or realize that you didn’t need to

in the face of such desolation

given you can see the universe

unscrolling space and time and light

in every grain and star cell of your being

with the same cold-hearted disposition that kills lambs.

Yes, but the bushes God spoke from in September

throughout the Valley like a ventriloquist

are now so deeply brown you can see

the occasional flaring of a flame

of dark mahogany ground willow

the colour of dry blood

still burning in the rain

and understand why brown

was Rembrandt’s favourite mystic background.

And there’s the albino steeple

of the local white-washed church

with its congregation of shadows

sitting dejected at the side of the highway

miles of farmland beyond

to say what a small thing a crucifix is

compared to a plough

with hands that used to pray

holding its head up on its knees

like a gravestone

that had given up waiting

to get its own cemetery

because people have the lifespan

of their great grandfather’s

home-made bookshelves around here

except for the under-rated suicidal adolescents

playing chicken

with vehicular and pharmaceutical roadkill.

The highway’s a tramp.

It’s got too much lipstick on

and it’s painted its asphalt eyelids

with artificial fireflies

to up the amperage of its radiance

in the cosmetic mirrors

of its rear view crocodile tears.

But I’ve got a black gangster hat on

that fits me like the moon fits a total eclipse

and I’m not about to take a bath in my own grave

to save a siren on the rocks

that hisses and spits at every car that goes by

as if she were raised

like an ill-mannered bird in a mailbox

that never got a loveletter back

though she sang her heart out

like a boat-tailed grackle in the rain.

The long blond manes of yesterday’s

palomino pampas grass

have thrown their gauchos off like hairdos

and soaking wet

gone for the quizzical long-necked emu look

of exiled Chileans

being water-boarded by the weather

in a country that doesn’t believe in torture.

A phalanx of brake-light spearmen up ahead

dripping in the blood of a wounded highway

waiting for the long slow

periodic sentence of an empty freight train to pass

like one co-ordinate conjunction after another,

all medium and no message

and there on the town side of the tracks

beyond the last gate before home

a garden of traffic lights and streetlamps,

lots of flash

but nothing much illuminated

in the flowerless night rain of late November

when novels that have been waiting in the wings all year

playing solitaire with their anonymous narratives

as they change with the seasons

losing their inspiration for the loneliest of reasons

begin to think about taking creative writing lessons

to give a boost to their morale

by jump-starting their muses

with borrowed battery cables

in a chilly room off a long heritage hall

in a super-sized red brick building

with a brass plaque to the right

of the heartwood of a heavy oak door

that’s more enduring than it is original.

PATRICK WHITE

TRYING TO PUT SOME DISTANCE

TRYING TO PUT SOME DISTANCE

Trying to put some distance between myself and my past

is like trying to stale-mate a cloud with a mountain

by resorting to the last hope of all experienced liars,

objectivity. Third person singular pronouns,

he, she, it. Shipping containers from alien places

stacked neatly on the dock

like coffins and cord wood

you can talk and write about as if

you weren’t buried in anyone of them

and none of the stowaways

and none of the illegal immigrants

and none of the corpses

were anymore related to you

than Cantonese graffiti from Seattle that rode the rails

all the way to Jakarta like one long sentence

about something you dreamed last night in your sleep.

Somebody’s else’s views in somebody elses’ language.

You can stand on one side of the tracks

in the red glare of the most serious-minded lights

at the road block with the crossed swords

and half-bored with waiting for things to pass

read the story of your life on the sides

of the train going past gene by gene

in the most unlikely couplings of a chromosome.

You can read your own genome

like beads in the rosary you’re kneading

between your thumb and your forefinger

as if you were counting the prophetic skulls

of the full moons that have passed

without any sign of a harvest on an abacus.

You can hide your past under the death mask of someone else.

You can play scrabble with the sign of the zodiac

you were born under,

you can rearrange your stars

and lie to your scars about which among many wounds

was their real birth mother,

you can spin a new myth of origin like a changeling

to explain why your axis is tilted beneath the equator

but when you’re finishing patching over to another gang

and you’ve got new top and bottom rockers

and a brand new mandala on your back to empower you

and your winding down the Malahat on Vancouver Island

that writhes along the side of the mountain

like a snake with its head pinned by your front wheel fork

two hundred feet above the tiny eyelids

of the waves with the white lashes

on the surface of the sea below,

thinking of Jefferson Airplane’s

tongue in cheek retort to John Donne

that no man’s an island.

He’s the Saanich Peninsula

though they didn’t say Saanich

but if the peninsula fits wear it

and that’s where I was at the time.

You can tear the wire you’ve been wearing

like the narrative of your life

as if your own mind were listening in on you

from another room in the hotel across the street

and your silence would still provide enough evidence

to prosecute you for living outside the box

instead of just sitting in it

and trying to think of a way out.

All those improbable entrances with impossible exits

you walked through to change your life irreparably

like some crude street rendition

of the Eleusinian Mysteries in Edmonton

just to verify your right to exist

in a world that rejected its own extremities

like the left hand of fate and circumstance.

And it wasn’t so much the actuality you were after,

that would come of its own accord

like an apple after the blossom,

but just the mere chance

of being someone you weren’t

who wasn’t burnt and bitter

wary, angry, cruelly clear-sighted

as a spider-mount on a telescope

waiting to catch stars in the webs

of the glimmering constellations

they mistook for dreamcatchers.

Every cubic centimetre of me back then

as dense and intense as a black dwarf

that sucked all the light out of the air

so that even in broad daylight

I always felt this darkness within me

like a night too heavy for the world to bear.

My mind was always a wavelength shy of a snake pit

when I was around other people

that hadn’t been chronically humiliated

by growing up poor

and my heart would condemn itself out of hand

just to deny them the privilege

of doing it for themselves eventually

and to show them the difference between

a passive scapegoat and a demonized pariah

that wouldn’t hesitate to use his horns

on any matador of the moon

who thought he had the crescents for it.

Alone under the microscope

I furnished my solitude like a habitable planet

with converging mindstreams

that carried me out to sea

like an empty lifeboat

drifting down the Milky Way

like a leaf, like a poem, like

a deep insight into the radiance of nothing

as soon as it got dark enough to see the stars.

Out of the void I sought shelter in

emerged a truce of aloof familiars

who were multilingually conversant

with my kind of madness and imagination.

And I called them Azazel, Blue Flower, Black Dog,

Dead Dog’s Dream Self, Character and Womanpit,

and of the ones that appeared the most benign

one was a mystically empowered altruistic idiot,

one was the tabla rasa Adamic blank slate of everyman

and one the female sister demon of my right brain

that was dark and artistic and long-suffering.

And of the first magnitude black hole constellations

with eyes like dice pricked out like fang marks

on an occult starmap of dark matter,

one was a Satanic standard bearer

who had gone from being a scapegoat

to being the master of a Renaissance of evil

with the Machiavellian curiosity of a reptile

intrigued by its deepening insight into mammals

and the other two were the black farces

of their own burnt out legends

passively-aggressive as extinct volcanoes

growling at each other

in the nightmare of their waking hours

like fortune-cookies strung out along the same fault line

like junkies who rage at the futures

that keeping give up on them

like a species that knows its endangered

all the way from southern California

through West Vancouver up to Alaska.

There’s a big part of everyone

that wasn’t born of man or woman

when they’re alone with their own cartoons

and the mythic inflation and deflation of themselves

makes them feel the whole universe

is breathing along in unison with them

between rapturous moments of solar exhilaration

and dead seabeds of lunar depression

like a musician with his finger on the pulse

of the copulating wavelengths

of a blues guitar in heat at high tide

he’s going to ride out like providence into the flood.

These were my Sahaba,

my lost tribe of desert companions,

the nightwinds that came all wrapped in black

like lone Tuariq out of the southern Libyan Sahara

like dark energy in a whirlwind of stars

ready to kill you from a great distance

for drawing the waters of life

out of one of their wells

without tribal consent.

And who knows what flows down into the mind

from what mountaintops

or through the valleys of whose heart before you?

Maybe there’s some leftover starlight in the mix

and the taste of a full moon

lingering on the tongue of a corpse

like a coin some loved one put there

like a sacred syllable to protect it against the dark.

And the tears of someone you never knew

for things you’re not aware of

crying like a waterclock from life to life

like the dream theme of a mindstream

that keeps the whole thing together

like the loose thread of a flying carpet

that just keeps on unravelling.

Life is a geriatric medium with a young message.

The oasis mentors the mirage

like a dance company rehearses Swan Lake.

Dark matter is strung out through the universe

like a junkie neurally connected to the same mind

we all are the way water is to intelligence and lucidity.

We’re all drinking from the same mindstream

in our own skull.

And when I pass mine around

like a sacred chalice of the moon

around a common fire

to each of my familiars and anti-selves

thrown together in this desert of stars

like symbols that made a habit of each other

for mutual survival,

the big question

that’s always greeted with silence

is whether life’s an exorcism or a seance.

Were we driven out of somewhere

we all long for

for things we can’t recall

to never be summoned back,

or were we invited here

by an anonymous unresponsive host

possessed by his own imagination

to guess at who or what he might be

so the hidden secret can know itself

in every one of us?

And I ask myself creatively

is the potential for darkness

greater than the reality of light?

Is the one infinite

and the other doomed to be exhausted

by living it one insight at a time

some with the lifespan of stars

some like fireflies and lightning

some in the shadows of black walnut trees

and some like me

who dream under the eyelids of past eclipses

like a dragon who once swallowed

a black cosmic egg whole

to bring rain to the new moon

without putting its ancient root fires out?

PATRICK WHITE

ESTRANGED FROM MY MYTH OF ORIGIN

ESTRANGED FROM MY MYTH OF ORIGIN

Estranged from my myth of origin

by the astronomical catastrophe

that alienated me from my own kind

life just kept on happening ark after ark.

I wasn’t consulted.

I wasn’t warned.

I wasn’t misguided

by some miscreance of happenstance.

Whatever excruciating transformations you go through

and however perverse your mutations might seem

to the jump-started creationists

holding up a limp finger to God

like the red-capped pole of a positive battery terminal

that hasn’t been fully charged yet

to be is just to be.

That’s it.

That’s all.

It’s as unsayably clear and open ended as that

without the stopwatch of an opposite

to measure the ten paces you walk out

before you turn in a last duel with yourself

with time as the second that stands up

for the defeated honour of your corpse

lying at its feet like a matador gored by a rose.

It’s the darkest inkwells

that reveal the deepest insights

you can bring out indelibly

like a total eclipse of the moon

into the light through words

like night birds in inaccessible groves

whose voices take flight over the hills

and across the lakes

like an echo in an urn

heard like a lonely mantra

under the eras of the stars

but seldom seen for what they are.

So many masks of meaning

without eyelids

I outgrew in the late spring of my life

when I effaced myself

like a Japanese plum tree

until nothing but the wind was behind me

and the gutter of a residential street

that ran through downtown Victoria

intermingling genies of gasoline

with the fragrance of the rain

that doubled as my version of homesick poets

studying Zen in southern China

like ugly ducklings

among the enlightened swans

sailing down the Yangtze to the great sea

where sentience doesn’t taste of such distinctions.

Ask any moment in passing like a stranger

you accosted on the street

like your own reflection

in a storefront windowpane

who you are now

or make discrete enquiries

among the wisest of the spiritual death masks

you sought in the past to emulate

like plastic surgery on the face of a gangster

on the run from himself

and they’ll all ask you for an alibi

and publish your poems

like unwanted posters

with a bounty on your head

for identity theft among the great imposters.

And you might come to think of yourself

as a great trickster,

Loki, a crow, a fox,

a sacred clown of the Ogallala Sioux,

the gleeman of a greater god

with a blacker sense of humour than you

and come to realize in the course of time

your god is a fraud

but his disguise is real.

Tears painted on a clown’s face

are always wetter than the real ones

and there’s nothing you can do to peel them off

like the skins and colours of a bike gang

but let go like a Japanese plum blossom in the spring

or a silver Russian olive in the fall

down by the Ottawa Canal

when the fish are too polluted

for the drunks to eat.

We’re all damaged goods

one way or another.

No one gets out alive or unwounded

and it’s anyone’s fanatical guess

between love life time death God and the Devil

which is the hardest to relate to

when most of the time

you can’t even tell

the fruits of one from another

when you use that as a way to get to know them.

Kafka said that we all lie in the lap

of a vast intelligence

and on a good day

part of me can relate to that.

And on a bad

I’d say most people lie in the lap of their own

as if they were looking after some pet

they called themselves

that spoiled them.

Because of all the miseries they’ve had to endure.

Because of all the places they’ll never be from.

Because of all the times

they offered up more than they had to give

for love

and it was rejected

and they had no use for it after that.

How many times has someone said to me

I’m looking for myself

and when I asked them

what they called the part

that was doing the looking

they immediately saw how impossible

it was to be lost

because the mind

which isn’t anything at all

is just one big cosmic lost and found

and you can fall anywhere in it

and it amounts to the same as rising.

Hey

but even the stars aspire to the unattainable

and it can be incredibly exalting

to perish in your own defeat

fighting for something

you don’t know if you really believe in

but never need to doubt your motives

for getting behind

because you just prefer it that way

and that about says it all.

You just prefer it that way.

You don’t need to analyze, disguise

revise, anathematize, apotheosize,

or cover your eyes in an interview

with chameleonic irises

because, yes, there’s a pot

at the end of the rainbow

but there’s as much shit in it

as there is gold

and it’s always been your preference

what you stuff your pockets with,

what you take home

and it’s by that and that alone

not your ideology

not your mystic philosophy

not your myth of origin

not your sense of morality

as if your senses knew anything about ethics

but your preference, just your preference

your simple, single-minded, indefensible preference

that you’re known.

PATRICK WHITE

TAKING AN UPBEAT FLAMBUOYANT APPROACH TOWARD CATASTROPHE

TAKING AN UPBEAT FLAMBUOYANT APPROACH TOWARD CATASTROPHE

Taking an upbeat flambuoyant approach toward catastrophe.

A good attitude to go on perishing by.

Adept at it.

Like Atlantis happy enough

if it can find a horizon

let alone a lifeboat on it.

Been doing it my whole life.

Because more than once I’ve contended

for and against myself

I was born fortunately too stupid to be a cynic.

Optimism is the heaviest cross of all to bear

up a hill of skulls stacked there by Mongols

who wanted to know if the myth of Sisyphus

were true or not and somehow got my apostasy

mixed up with his

and mistakenly crucified the absurd

on top of Mt. Sumeru, the world mountain,

to get the city of God to surrender without a fight.

I’m the last two apocryphal commandments

that were driven out into the desert

like the twin scapegoats

of the baker’s dozen

and the carpenter’ inch

when the other ten went metric.

Love a lot and you’ll know what to do

without being told to.

Or, option B, heed none of the above

and take your chances

freelancing out along the razor’s edge

like an ice breaker

looking for a northwest passage through your throat.

Pretty radical for a rootless tree like me

who didn’t set out in life to be

the rolling stone that kicked off an avalanche

like a slow boy playing toe-hockey with a mountain

on a thatched road on his way home from night school.

Fool, said my muse to me

as if it were talking to Sir Philip Sydney

look into your heart and write.

And you can tell by the colour of my lips

I’ve been drinking eclipses out of an inkwell ever since

convinced I’m a fallen sparrow in an ailing kingdom

that’s been sipping elixirs like cocktails

out of a holy grail with little black umbrellas in it

that keep blooming in the house

like a black mass of bad luck.

I tried emptiness once

like a home-brewed remedy for heart burn

that tasted like Peking duck on a pyre of gasoline.

But the void spit me out

like the Johnny Appleseed of sacred syllables

so whenever I try to meditate my way back into the void

through the backdoor

I don’t chant aum, but ouch

and the dark night of my soul

deepens into the anti-enlightenment

of the sinister dark matter at hand

like a Sicilian family at the beginning

of twentieth century New York

where they ghettoize the scapegoats

each according to their ethnicity

so you can recognize them

like the logos of brand-names

the yellow stars, the black hands,

the four leaf clovers, the West Side stories

of the Spanish moons in partial eclipse

or if there’s anyone else there like me

the skull and crossbones

I wear like my heart on my sleeve.

It’s three a.m., for example,

in a crummy Holiday Inn hotel room

overlooking Lake Ontario

where the dead fish

surface belly-up like U-boats along the shore

and a naked fan of my poetry

off in dreamland without me

looks like a mermaid washed up

in the surf of the bedsheets on her own rocks.

I’m sitting in the dark

before a wide-screen window

trying to make out the constellations

through the light pollution of Kingston

the way I used to reconstruct secret messages

like the Rosetta Stone

in grade four

from the few letters that were left

when the chalkboard wasn’t completely erased

by some windshield wiper of a teacher

trying to change the subject in a hurry

like some white-wash graffiti artist under a bridge

that didn’t want to get caught in the cover-up

that lied to the whole class

about the iron pyrite truths

that lay ahead of us

like a bright future of fools’ gold.

But even if the starlight’s been diminished

by a smear campaign

that’s going to take more than Windex to undo

and they’ve lost some of their criminal lustre

I still see in each of those rogue stars

the dark boat of a rum-runner

beached like me with a mermaid

in the labyrinth of the Thousand Islands

ten years after the lifting of prohibition left

everyone with a hangover for the rest of their lives

knocking their heads against a locked door

like the yachts in the docks below me.

There are some poets like Shakespeare

who recommend giving airy nothing

a local habitation and a name

and I’m not calling him a rat;

it’s good advice for all honest citizens of the universe

when they’re talking to the cops,

but it smacks a little too much of the snitch to me

and I’m sitting here with my mouth shut

staring blankly out

into the airy nothing of this night sky

trying to write a poetic alibi

for why I’ve got nothing to say

and even when the heat gets turned up so high

there’s sweat on the inside of the one-way windows,

I still refuse to squeal on yesterday.

PATRICK WHITE