TO A YOUNG POET

TO A YOUNG POET

As you are now, and I have been

a long branch at the top of the tree

in a black spring, reaching out

for the fury of a distant star

to adorn your spine

with a leaf of light

that might be the sail

on a boat full of worlds

that will thunder like windfall fruit

or an army of hearts

pulsing across the drumhead plain

of your moon-salt thoughts,

their liberation, a sea of blood,

a squall of vipers, a murder,

and a brazen idol away

from the beguiling taste of another paradise. What

does this mean? This means

I come before you

like a brutal lighthouse without a warning,

unfolding wings of light like a stormbird

slipped like a letter

under the door of huge winds

that have driven most sailors to shore,

prudently seasoned

by what the ocean can do. But you are

a creature of the depths,

a volcanic thermophile

grown gigantic in your darkness

and your solitude, the Cyclopean shadow

you would cast on the castle walls

in the tiniest burning house of time

if only there were light and life enough

to convince the grotesque it’s beautiful;

the folly of your unknown world

is the secret wisdom of a second moon. Not

insane enough yet

to be a credible witness

to the antics of your own asylums

where the mad angels

swear you’re real and fling you like a drug

they won’t take across

the lunar floor

of your infamous acquiescence, I come to you

like a prophetic lighthouse, arms of light

outstretched on the edge of a towering cliff,

pleading like a Druid with God

for answers I could sacrifice

like rams and humans

to questions on the altars of a mountain brain

that heaves me like a continent

up out of the depths and opens my mouth

to announce a black wind in the abandoned caves of silent oracles.

I can hear the whisper

of the serpent ghosting through the grass

in a cemetery of dead echoes, and I can read the names

of the midnight shipwrecks

you have suffered on the inclement shores

of your own island consciousness. Are you marooned

or is it that you’re just choosey

about rescues and life-boats?

Unfolding these petals of light like straitjackets, like tides,

I come before you,

a navy sunk in a well on the moon,

no footprints on the map to where your treasure is buried

like the jewels and wishbone harps of the dead.

I’ve always disappointed my own wisdom,

and the dark-hearted clowns

of the suicidal circus

that waits like a sense of humour

for an encore,

have long ago died without applause

like unexploded shells

far from their badly-aimed humanity.

Like the universe, whose life

hasn’t been a clown

shot out of a cannon

without a safety-net? So

I come before you without a face, a mask,

a self, or the worn-out authority of a wound

scarred like a book out of the sum

of all my failures, offering

these simulacra of keys to what

has no need of a lock, but conceals your fate

in a mouthless rumour of intimate stars.

And I do not come to fill the dead seabeds of the moon

with tears and raise vast armadas against the fact;

no one need tell the wind the world is sad,

nor multiply the horrors of hell like bitter weeds

in the ashes of the wheat when fire itself,

so long the nun of its own burning,

pledged to ferocious purities,

is corrupted by what it consumes.

And among these murmurs of murder and war,

these corpses and civilizations sandbagged into seawalls

against this toiling deluge of blood, who

but the most unfeeling, could indulge

the obscenity of the lie

that life is beautiful or good

in the radiant marrow of the bone

cracking like a flute in the jaws of an iron dog?

Nor do I come scrying fissures in the sky

marking annual Armageddons

in a calendar of vengeful tomorrows. If the world

isn’t already worthy of love

it could never be worthy of hatred.

No curse, no blessing, no reform or utopian felicity,

ignorance and enlightenment both

one heartbeat shy of the truth,

and freedom, compassion, genius,

three brides on a bridge of snails,

how could I come before you clearly

if there were anything in my hands? Fire

doesn’t need a teacher to burn

nor the wind an instructor to fly

and if you haven’t already been struck

like a birdless tree

by lightning on the moon

what farce of the sublime could show you

what you don’t need to know

to be what you are

when spring comes like a voice, a whisper of bliss,

a green arsonist, a jest of life

to the startled garden

in the rootless urn of your unsayable longing?

PATRICK WHITE

AUBADE WITH AMBIGUITIES

AUBADE WITH AMBIGUITIES

Everywhere I go

I am buckled by sorrows

weeping like executioners

in hooded doorways

for the harvest of doves

they’ve bloodied

with their smiles,

for the ruined roses

that stain the hospital gowns

of soft-spoken guillotines.

And when I ask

for the address

of a rumour of joy

that might risk

a cameo appearance in my heart,

I am caught in the traffic jam

of an outdoor movie

that is just another rerun

of misunderstood butterflies

draped in spider-webs.

And the restaurants are full

of lunar refugees

confessing the names of God

on a rosary of skulls

spooled from the mass graves

of irremedial exterminations;

and on the highways,

drug-soaked children,

famous among milk-cartons,

running from rescue

all the way to Calgary

with Eldorado serial killers

in cowboy hats.

I do not think I was born

to be happier

than any other man,

nor dance with rivers all my life

under the chandeliers

of waltzing willows,

I am content

to let the autumn stars

sugar the apples

and the wines of life

that have dreamed so long

of mystic bloodstreams

wake up from their coma

of midnight suns

to flirt with the morning curtains,

but everywhere I ask for water,

the odour of dogs

rotting in stairwells,

virulent mothers

blistering coke in baby spoons

and lonely adolescents

picking at the scabs

of their showcase labels

like empty whiskey bottles

cruising for flowers

on emergency fire-escapes.

And how could I ignore

the inconsolable clowns

in convulsions of grief,

and the reptilian angel-slayers

that rise from the depths

like snapping turtles

to unfeather the stupefied swans

as if they tore

the pages out of a book,

dragging the clouds down

into the hot mud

of ambiguous bottom feeders?

Everywhere the air

grows tumescent

on the yeasts of grief

and the planet groans

like a death-cart

full of starfish, full

of fractured wish-bones,

full of the severed hands

of TV amputees.

And I want to pay the late fees

on the lightning that struck

the horns of the snail

like a war-crime, I want

to green the emeralds again

that were bleached in a flash

by the physics of food, my heart

burns to proclaim to the tribunals

that reek of thick colognes

and pounds of atrocious innocence,

that humans were born

to see and be amazed,

that there are still plants

in the scalded jungles

that will come forward

like shy cures, and golden salamanders

that will give us back our legs and arms,

that we’re not just a necropolis

of flesh-eating bacteria,

that there are truths and beauties

and ethics of water

that aren’t just triumphal marches

under the arches of our vertebrae,

that there are gods at work

like tender waterlilies

transforming the swamp,

turning the shit back

into intimate constellations

that won’t dwarf the night

with staggering distances

or runt the wonder

of our brevity

with the unattainable radiance

of reversible wedding gowns.

I want to make it all better,

breeze the pain

with blue-eyed summers

from a cedar hope chest,

appease the hungry

with mountains of bread

ored from miraculous grains,

talk the bridges down

from their keystone suicides

by showing them what’s needed

to get to the other side;

do everything I can

to grant immunity

to the bloodbank

that cries constantly

under my window at night

for braver transfusions,

give up an eye if I must

to defray the cost

of blind justice,

do whatever it takes

to prune the hazardous stars

from the razorwire crowns

of our unexempted suffering.

But everywhere I go,

roadkill redirecting traffic,

arsonists in volunteer fire brigades

pissing on a field that’s burning,

closet terrorists in uniformed bomb squads,

defusing suspect shopping-malls,

computer-generated humans

mechanizing the rights of man,

soldiers safer in the army

than children in their beds,

leaders following the followers

in climacterics of lemmings,

the rich bitching the poor

are the reason they suffer,

deviants preaching deliverance

to delinquents on their knees,

free markets enslaving nations

to brand-names on demand,

banks robbing the wretched

to give to those with more,

genocide on probation

while murder goes to jail,

excellence cowed by fools

when ignorance runs in schools,

doctors despising health

as an obstacle to wealth.

Anyway, you get the picture.

When the fleas

train the tigers

to jump through fire

and the crows

coach the hawks

to look for silver,

or the avalanche

tells the mountain

where to stand

for a photo-op,

even if you feel,

even if the heart

bleeds like a blackberry

punctured by thorns,

and you’re up

to your neck

in a starless tarpit

darker than night,

and the bombs fall

like meteors like

the foundation stones

of crystal palaces,

is there a point

a pebble

an afterlife under

these quicksand pyramids,

these deserts in an hourglass,

this crack in the dawn

to build another world upon?

PATRICK WHITE

AT SEVENTEEN

AT SEVENTEEN

At seventeen, having crawled out from under the street

and made my way through the culture shock

of my first year of an affluent university

with easy access to the sea,

I made my way north to a pit stop coffee-shop

on a lonely highway at a place

called Windy Point as I recall

northwest of Prince George.

I remember the tractor trailers full of strawberries

festering like hot sacrificial hearts

bruised by the quick summer,

and the electrically charged aura of bees and wasps

that hovered over them and hummed

like a powerline tuning up in the rain.

I was a young teacher assigned by Frontier College

to live and labour and teach

five hours a night after dinner on a work train,

lining, tamping, laying track on an extra gang

of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway,

forty miles as the crow flies into the bush.

I remember the impoverished trees

that grew smaller and smaller

in the immensity of their solitude and mine

as I was driven deeper into the bush

by two railwaymen who said about as much

to the long-haired hippie in the back of their jeep

as I’d said all year to myself in my sleep,

as the silence grew more aggressive by the mile

bumped along by the side of the track.

You him. Yup. Get in. And that was it.

That was as much of a welcome as I was going to get.

Or as far as they were concerned

I had a right to expect because

the illusive idealism of the sixties

was still an embryo in the matrix of a dreamcatcher

trying to jimmy the locks on the doors of perception

forgetting it’s just as easy as light

as it is for a thief or the moon

to get in through the windows.

The threat of their worst nightmare

coming unglued like the perfectly bound

paperback edition

of their unlovable orthodoxy

and unlivable reactionary redneck rectitude.

Flower power spread like fire

through the radicalized roots

of the underdogs, draft dodgers and drop-outs

fight for the right to cast its vote

like Japanese cherry blossoms on the wind

to accommodate a better more spontaneous world

to the portable Zen of their creative imaginations.

The hawks and the doves,

the fireflies locked in ice

and the snowflakes on a furnace

fighting over whose cosmic eggs

in a war of F-4s against

magic carpets with a flight plan

best measured up to the wingspan

of the winds of change

while down below their nests

in the highest crowns of the trees

dark wavelengths

hatched out of their black holes

like baby snakes

that had just passed through

the third eye of the needle

aspiring to win their wings

and become dragons of the air

by swallowing the eggs of either species

whole cosmologies at a time

and regurgitating the remains

like the collapsed parachutes

and used condoms of the moon

as if they could shed their skins

from the inside out.

Either extreme a fang in the skull

of a harvest moon in a year of famine.

And there were far fewer people

trying to firewalk their way to the stars

back in those days than there were

spiritual tourists trying to walk on water.

So I took the middle extreme of the dragon’s path

and grew a third wing down the spine of my back

like the keel of a schooner,

the dorsal fin of a shark

with the heart of a dolphin

or the tail rudder of a plane

just to keep things immensely balanced

like a phoenix between Icarus and the sun.

I oscillated like a wavelength of starmud

between the Himalayan apexes

of mystic contemplation,

the death valleys of meditation,

and the troughs where it got down and dirty

as the mysticism of action

that had to follow the blossom of insight

like water all the way up from the root

and then take it a step further, into the fruit.

And that’s why I volunteered

the sceptical lack of innocence

of my ambiguous idealism

to be brutalized by the wilderness

into the scar tissue of experience

as if I had just skinned a unicorn

and now I had to tan the leather.

And that’s why I was on my way

to bring education to the working man

in the wilds of northern B.C.

At seventeen, I was

the Johnny Appleseed of knowledge

armed to the teeth

with the revolutionary rose

of a virtuous cause

righteous as the thorn of the moon

in the side of the dawn.

I was the ladder out of the same snakepit

of poverty and ignorance I had crawled out of

like the skeleton of a hummingbird

out of a continental shipwreck

that had nowhere to dock in Atlantis but down.

One foot each astride two ties of a railway trestle,

nothing but a fifty pound iron lining bar

wedged under the track

as I pulled with all my might

backwards into oblivion

to align with one parallel line with another.

And through the gap between the ties

a hundred and twenty feet below me

a thin silver stream, tinfoil in sunlight,

wandering through the grey skulls

of a washed-out cemetery of insight.

The rocks I would be smashed upon

like an egg head out of the nest

if I were to suddenly fall like Icarus

through the gaps in the supine ladder

I was standing on,

or in the cruel grey eyes of the men

who were sizing me up

showed any kind of cowardice

to remind them how dangerous this was,

or if I used my education

like a parachute I could pull out of my ass

every time I was called upon like a bridge

to bestride the abyss like a man

and keep my shit together

as if courage weren’t a virtue,

but a gland I was missing from birth.

Gnothi seauton Socrates said in his Attic dialect,

as he was about to drink the hemlock.

Know yourself and I did well enough

to know as I often had in similar situations

when bravery might let you down

madness was enough to pull you through,

and for reasons they well understood

made me as crazy as they were,

I slowly won their respect

and one by one they came

to my little frontier school

where I bunked alone

coupled to my long, lonely train of thought

like a mutant gene

to a helical protein molecule

we went to work everyday with lining bars

to straighten out after

underground rivers of clay

had moved under them in the night

like flesh and blood drawn to a new idea.

I taught the Portuguese, who,

after working ten hours a day

would wash up, eat, play soccer till dark,

and then come to me

to learn how to swear back at bigots

like the low men on the totem pole

of British Columbians, Albertans,

New Brunswickers, Newfies and natives

in that hierarchical order of serfdom.

Exiles, outlaws, refugees, lunatics, outcasts,

who’d fill their pillows with modest samples

of the pubic hair of every woman

they’d ever slept with for years

or by four in the afternoon, every afternoon

when the timekeeper called a break

to let it happen, would shake their fist at the sun

and throw shovels around as hard as they could

that would kill you outright

if you ever got in the way of one

like a proofreader mistaking verbs for nouns

in an unknown mother tongue

that only the sun

and thousands of hectares of muskeg understood.

These were the mad ones, the ones

who worked like troglodytes all day,

arms sinewed like railroad tracks,

hearts beating like anvils in the hot sun

and said nothing,

as if nothing need be said

after forty years in the bush.

But come night in the separate cars

they each were assigned

to sleep isolated in the dark,

had raging conversations with themselves

like a treeful of roosting crows

so you couldn’t tell if you were listening

as I did every night in curious apprehension

the anguished echo of one voice

from another being thrown

across the room in rebuttal

by a polyglot ventriloquist

like Luther’s startled inkwell at Lucifer.

And then at four again, every afternoon,

shovels flung anywhere

like the hands of a clock

flying off like the petals of a propeller

as if they hated God for something

and for ten to fifteen minutes

at four in the afternoon every day

for as long as anyone could remember

felt compelled to start a riot

against the sun, the sky gods,

the wind, the wilderness, who knew,

but even they seemed to know

like crows at the highest pitch of their protest,

they couldn’t do anything about.

Nothing in the Norton Anthology of English Literature

nor a few weeks in a training session

at the University of Calgary

to see who would be posted where

had prepared me for this

but I winged it like a stone or an Arctic Cat

out over the open water of a lake

and soon I had several classes

of natives, Portuguese, drunken reprobates,

and a mix of curiosity seekers

more interested in being entertained

than educated on a work train

where nothing much ever happens

except extreme violence on a Friday night

and tragic accidents in the workplace

that could have been avoided.

And what surprised

and humbled me the most

two philosophers, one

from New Brunswick

and the other, Alberta,

who’d been out here so long

in the brutal isolation of the bush,

keeping their lives to themselves,

they made Henry David Thoreau look like a fake.

And for five months it went on like this

until UBC sent me the first film

to be screened on a work train this far north

and it turned out to be opening night

for the much anticipated premiere

of two teenagers learning about syphilis,

that immediately estranged a packed house

who thought I was talking down to them

as if they didn’t already know

everything there was to know about the disease.

Though I tried to plead with them

this wasn’t my choice of movies

but some idiot’s down south,

I knew my Socratic moment had come

to drink the hemlock of my idealism

and after I was knocked out in a bar fight

stepping out of a washroom in Prince George

I woke up back on the train

with a raging migraine that felt like

forty thousand hectares of muskeg

and a time keeper urgently insisting

I go back into Prince George without hesitation,

buy a thirty-eight from a friend of his,

and shoot the motherfucker who did this to me

to teach him some respect for the English language.

And that was it, time to go,

time to blow Windy Point,

time to thumb my way back to Vancouver

as if I were turning the pages of book

where art had failed to imitate life

convincingly enough to put a full stop

like a bullet hole through the temple

of some drunk logger’s head

which is what I had to do in their eyes.

Pick up a gun to prove I was man enough

to go on teaching them

about John Donne’s attitude toward death

and know from first hand experience

that left no doubt in their minds

I knew what I was talking about.

And of course I wasn’t and didn’t.

And for hundreds of miles

of black asphalt after that

I felt like a tractor trailer

hauling thousands of wounded strawberries

bruised by their own innocence

in a freak encounter with experience

to a hard empty free bench for the night

in the Camby Street bus station

that helped immeasurably in the morning

put all this behind me for awhile

like the wake of a ferry in the Georgia Straight

threading its way through the islands

wondering what just went down in despair

like another undermanned lifeboat over the side

of the flat moon society

rowing for all their worth

in a dead sea of shadows

that Sisyphus would have understood

balanced on a turtle’s carapace

like the skull of the earth

when it rises over the horizon

like a magic mushroom

or the podium at the head of a classroom

everyone pushes out of the way

to prove they can relate without barriers

to anyone eye to eye

without knowing whether

they really can or not

and whether the bond

is mutually reciprocal

until it’s way too late

way too late not to, brother.

PATRICK WHITE

TRYING TO LAUGH AT MYSELF

TRYING TO LAUGH AT MYSELF

Trying to laugh at myself to get out of a black depression. Mad. Angry. Sad. The way January is sad but cold. Lonely in a way that doesn’t call for company. Intense, but then so are the stars. Everything missing, but no sense of anything lacking. A desert, but nothing in arrears. Not a cynic. Nor wholly yet, the dupe of my own ideals. Truly impoverished the man who doesn’t have anything in his life to make a fool of himself over. He upstaged the waters of life conceptually and now he swims through glass. I pity him who doubts the echo of his own voice and can’t let the universe put its hand from behind over his eyes like the wings of a child from time to time and ask him to guess. Who’s this? It’s true that clarity can sometimes feel like your eyes had just been slashed by an edge of broken glass, but that doesn’t mean you take a scalpel to the eyelids of a rose to get it to see what you do. Why bother if everything’s as futile as you say it is? The truth can wound. There’s no doubt about that. But it wounds like the beauty of a black rose with crescent moons for thorns. It doesn’t stick it to you like a dagger through the heart. Insight. Compassion. Blossom and fruit. Moonlight that heals what the daylight burns. A feel for the living that goes beyond thought. Like this voice that’s come to me out of thin air as I’m sitting here without any oars, trying to make an empty lifeboat out of the ribcage of a great white shark with eclipsed camera lenses for eyes. And I don’t know who they are, or if we’ve met somewhere in the prelude of a past life that led to this one, or even if talking to myself this way were a sure sign that matter doesn’t just bend space but mind and time as well. But it’s enough they know who they are and I’ve let them have their say, as I’ve had mine. As you who are listening in on this are having yours.

How cosmically still everything is. As if something were about to shatter. As if the mute, inanimate objects in the room had finally found their voice and were about to speak in tongues. The orange lamp, the violet vase that spills over like a watershed into an Arum ivy, the blue glass skull on the windowsill smearing the red logo of the bank across the street like blood all over its face, not nouns, but the verbs of a universal language we each translate in our own way into a dream grammar of Rosetta Stones. Prophetic skulls talking in our sleep. It’s good to let a gust of stars get in your eyes like a mirage once and awhile. It’s generous to let the dead slip through the doors of perception you’ve left ajar for their shadows to come in out of the cold and warm their bones around your fire, and tell you stories of who they were in life. They seldom stay long. And then they’re gone. Like smoke from a distant farmhouse in the winter dawn. Been down so long it looks like up to me, Richard Farina said on the way to die at his own book launching, thrown from the back of a motorcycle, but what’s that but the mood swing of an hourglass that keeps approaching its past like the future of something that hasn’t happened yet? And if you know what I mean, then it’s quite clear that you’re here in this asylum with me hoping no one’s discovered you yet. But there you are. I can see you. All tied up in knots like a wavelength in the corner. An embryo that’s trying to commit suicide by hanging yourself from the noose of your umbilical cord. Who are you? Did you get here the same way I did? Or by some other road? And why do that? You know something to be afraid of that I don’t? The things I fear most are not in a world of forms and it’s the crippled spirits that I find most dangerous. Are you a lamia, a lapwing, or the orphan moon of an unknown world that’s been entrusted to me like a secret that keeps to itself? Poor thing. Get up. Brush the ashes from your hair. The sleep out of the urns of your eyes. That shattered mirror out of your mind that kept on lying to you about how beautiful you weren’t even when you were and didn’t know it. Mirrors are like snakes, you can’t train them to bite other people or kiss your ass. All you can do is defang them like crescents of the moon, thorn by thorn, shard by shard like a snakepit of highly toxic chandeliers that have fallen on hard times. You just take some pliers and pull them out of your heart one by one like porcupine quills from the soft wet nose of a dog that will never learn. You stand there like the child of Joan of Arc martyred in the shadows of your mother’s sacrifice as if you belonged to a guild of secret saints, and you knock that chip of a demon off your shoulder who keeps whispering in your left ear if your fire is so much holier than mine, why haven’t you, as I have, immolated yourself in it yet? Just as there’s only one part in a hundred and twenty-six that’s different between you and a tree, chlorophyll or haemoglobin, whether you’re hanging from a crucifix or burning at the stake, there’s only one jewel’s difference between a dreamcatcher and a spiderweb. And that’s you, sapphire, the difference between two antidotes. But you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. Denying one thing here is as good as affirming it everywhere. And there are no laws here except the spontaneous physics of metaphor that’s driven us both like storm birds into the third eye of our own weather seeking asylum from the madness raging all around us like Jupiter, or, if I read you right, your violent father. I don’t know where this is. It doesn’t have a local habitation or a name, though I’ve been trying to give it one but nothing sticks. But here in this place for reasons I don’t fully understand, if you don’t want to sever your lifelines from those kites that you’ve been trying to keep up in the air like constellations, you learn to play so intensely with your creative imagination, whatever medium your working in, you’re absorbed like a child into the immensity of your own absence from your previous state of starless affairs. You’re shining, but you don’t need to know it. You’re dancing barefoot with the wind on air listening to the picture-music of the willows waltzing to the sound of the river that’s as light on its feet as it is on the mind. And there are visiting hours for people to come see you like bees and hummingbirds and dragonflies, or voices out of nowhere like the call of Canada geese high overhead at night in the autumn who speak for the dead in passing a last few intimate words they want the living to hear. Someone blows into your ear like the opening of an empty bottle that sounds like a wolf howling at the moon way off in the distance, so you listen to the message, and you write it down, and throw it like a whale with a prophet in its belly back into the sea like a fish you didn’t mean to catch that just jumped into your moon boat one night without putting up any kind of a fight. Here no one tries to turn the fireflies into the fixed stars of an orthodox starmap. You learn to delight in your madness like a native ritual you’ve been invited to participate in like tourist who was passing through and decided to stay like a flightplan that was happy to be grounded for light years in the homelessness of a space with feathers in its hair. Either that, if you take yourself too seriously, you die of terminal symbolitis in intensive care on the night ward of a hospital ship in dry dock on the moon and you miss your next port of call completely.

PATRICK WHITE