I SHALL NOT MISTAKE THE SILENCE
I shall not mistake the silence
of a small town on a winter night
when only the cold stars
work the nightshift of the lightless
windows
for the mordancy of a ruined bell.
I will not fletch the arrowhead of the
kingfisher
in its own feathers to strike it down
as if life were merely the art of
knowing
how to use others against themselves.
I will not drive
the first crescent of the waxing moon
like a tusk into war with the waning
heart of the last
for forgetting where it came from
and where it must go to die.
But I remember what Muhammad said
and the early Muslims under Omar
the second caliph of Islam took to
heart,
the angels won’t visit a town at four
in the morning
if anyone in it went to bed hungry.
Lack of bread was a sin against the
whole community
if you kept the fact to yourself
when every door was knocked upon and
asked,
so as not to deprive the people of the
angels’ blessing.
And they felt this for real
not in the half imitational touristy
way we do
as if we were just passing through town
looking for tea and antique butter
churns
we could buff our coke in
as soon as we got to Peterborough
or Havelock, to pick up the go-train to
Toronto.
They didn’t horde their lack of
anything.
But now we’re all standing in line
shoulder to shoulder with angels at the
food bank
trying to second-guess who it is we
should thank
if there’s anyone to thank at all.
And you’d be hard-pressed to find
anyone
who went to sleep tonight in this small
town
who wasn’t hungry for something
they’d be ashamed to admit to their
neighbours.
And since the angels have mingled with
the daughters of men
and Enkidu has lost the ability to talk
to the animals
and Gilgamesh lost his one organic
chance
of shedding one skin for another
like a waterclock on the moon
to an opportunistic serpent
who took advantage of him
while he was catching his breath,
and thereby rendered those
closest to the earth immortal and not
us,
I’m going to crunch through the snow
like I’m walking on eggs through a
field
in a clearing among the quiescent pines
on the highest hill on the Scotch Line
just before you get to Westport
and as indefensibly human, fallible,
and brief as I am
compared to the lifespans of the stars
and the rocks in these fields
that broke the tooth of the plough
and the spirit of the ploughman
for thinking it could dislodge and
wound them
like the Fertile Crescent
when even the glaciers tried but
couldn’t,
I’m going to sit here on a fallen
tree and wait
for the stars to divulge the esoteric
teachings
of their nocturnal perspective on life.
But I’m not going to impugn the night
air
as sharp and unfeeling as a diamond
cutter’s eye
for its lack of angels
or excoriate the frightening absence
of any explanation as to why
all we’ve been left with
to show for the centuries we’ve
laboured
in those unpropitious star fields
or these underfoot with the dead
in the cold-hearted cemeteries and
fields around Perth
to make the earth bring forth its
bounty
is nothing but fools’ gold in the
sky’s dead pan eyes.
Now you see it.
Now you don’t.
Like me among the living.
And those who aren’t.
Empty spaces between the stars
like frames that have had their
pictures cut out
like the bad parts of constellations
that used to hang there
blind-folded face to the wall with
their backs turned
to a firing squad of fireflies.
I can tell by how wrecked the pines are
even though the moon is applying itself
like a poultice
to their fractures and wounds,
that the wind’s really put them
through it this time
and that life is grave and violent and
serious.
You can poeticize the facts
but picking up the skull of a baby
racoon
like a moon rock that reminds you of
the paintings
of Georgia O’Keeffe
and a woman you once lived with
who was deeply influenced by her work,
you can deny, distract, or abstract
yourself
anyway you want for awhile
but sooner than later it hits home
that this small animal,
this empty nugget of bone
was once such as you
who felt the bewildered miracle of
being alive
to sense it could turn into a curse at
any moment
to make things cruelly and abundantly
clear
wonder’s no more of an excuse
in the eyes of the uncompromising
unarticulated spontaneity of its laws
than ignorance is.
And you realize
how futile and twisted
the wildflowers seem in the snow,
and how life keeps blowing smoke in
death’s eyes
like warm breath on the cold night air,
a gust of stars, a ghost or two,
the million silk seeds of the milkweed,
and the terrible finality that
confronts the temporal
with every breath, every step we take.
From the moment anything’s born
even its own afterbirth can turn on it.
And what makes it ambivalently worse
is that’s it’s beautiful being
here.
The stars, the juniper,
and all the little tracks that radiate
like aberrant lifelines out of them,
the groundwillow, the snow, moonlight
on the last gasp of leaves on the dead
aspen,
the eerie wailing of a young porcupine
that isn’t used to the solitude
and climbs a tree to go off
intermittently
like an air raid siren that isn’t
sure of itself,
and won’t know what there really is
to be afraid of
until it’s too late to evade it,
and not least of all nor different from
these
the idea of angels not visiting a town
where anyone goes to bed hungry at
night.
So could be a curse, could be a
blessing
as an old Chinese boatman used to say,
and maybe this godless freedom
the angels don’t show up for anymore
is the greatest gift and grace of them
all,
the third wing on the bird
that no one ever looks for,
the middle extreme of the immensity
that’s wholly open
to creative interpretation between us
like the dead souls in the bodies of
Canada geese.
My eyes include the stars in their
story
and the stars include my story in
theirs.
Same with pioneers, baby racoons,
the moon among the wounded pines
making plaster casts
to mend their fractured limbs,
or that gathering of solitudes
along the narrative theme of a river
that makes for small towns like Perth
where everybody’s been talking for
two centuries
about going somewhere else
as if their canoes were always half in
and half out of the water,
one cloven foot on Devil’s Rock
and the other stretched so far out over
the Tay River
it thinks it’s got wings on its heels
and keeps trying to migrate with the
water birds.
But with all the gates and locks,
canals, bridges, dams and waterwheels
you’d get the impression
Perth was running a prison for water
that’s been given a life sentence
without a chance of parole or appeal.
We’re better than beavers
at brainwashing water to go
wherever we want it to
even against its will.
No doubt a reflection of the
temperament
of the first people to build in this
place.
Make something in the vastness of this
solitude
that was recognizably useful.
Build a town.
Turn the dangerous wilderness
with a weapon in its hand
into a tool everybody could use and
understand.
The swords of retired British half-pay
officers
into imperial plough shares
in the hands of Irish immigrants.
Giant insects of hay balers and iron
rakes
rusting in the fields with horse faced
tractors
like an extinct species slowly being
engulfed
by the reclaimed starfields of the end
times
returning to the wild as the wind
and maple saplings change
the expressions on their faces
to something more relaxed and reassured
than military, resourceful and precise.
Displaced people like me show up out of
nowhere
And after they’ve stopped asking
everyone
where this place is on a starmap
of the multiverse
they begin to ask
who is this place
and it’s at that moment
the graves all over town
and those lost under maple leaves
along narrow trails deep in the woods
with the names of children on them
over by Black Creek
give up their dead like the sea
gives up a message in a bottle from the
past.
And you can hear them gibbering in the
birch leaves
silvered by the wind with excitement in
the moonlight
as if they were all clapping hands in
anticipation
of some big insight into what became of
them
and of what they did and didn’t do.
It’s only fair when you’re finished
looking through the telescope
at how unimaginable it all is
to give the ghosts a chance
to look into their future as well
so they can see that you’re living
what they did
story after story, death after death,
that the cones of the jack pines
still wait for a forest fire
to open their eyelids
even after twenty years of dreaming
to weep their seeds in the ashes of
their urns.
So my big idea
around four o’clock on a Wednesday
morning,
remembering that story about the angels
and not really caring
whether I sort the chaff from the
grain,
the hungry from the fat,
the scales from the feathers,
thinking every good story
has its villain as well as its hero,
its black holes and its radiant star
clusters,
its poison oak and its New England
asters,
and that’s what makes
for the character development
of our place in the universe,
I’d add a spider thread
like the tiniest filament of a
tributary sub-plot
to the main theme of a dreaming town
eleven miles away
and let it find its own way around
like a night creek flowing into deeper
waters
where an intensely visual imagination
actually does things in the
depths of reality
with the slightest of radical
adjustments to its roots
that no one ever suspects
by the time the effects come into
bloom.
I’m going to unspool my heart like a
fire kite
caught up in the wind like one of Van
Gogh’s stars
until it hovers like a flying saucer
where the angels used to appear over
the town of Perth
and though I know I’m making a farce
of myself
trying to live up to an enlightened
legend
of the common humanity
of our most contagious emotions,
just for one clear night
like an impossible probability
I’m going to feather myself in fire
like a fact in the image of Icarus
and whether it’s real or not,
take an angel’s place,
and in its huge absence
bestow as many unconditional blessings
as I can get away with
under the eyelids of the sleeping town
like pine-cones sowing the fires of
life
in the nurturing ashes of those
whose homely contribution
to the story at hand
is to know how to burn out
like a demonic poet
and hope somehow you got the job done
that no one who wasn’t
at least as half as mad as you could.
PATRICK WHITE
