MOMENT TO MOMENT, IS THIS MY AFTERBIRTH OR AFTERLIFE

MOMENT TO MOMENT, IS THIS MY AFTERBIRTH OR AFTERLIFE

Moment to moment, is this my afterbirth

or afterlife? Old, or sixty-five years young?

What nebulae does my breath make

on the window of life, cold and diminishing?

Pre-partum depression perhaps, the apple

falls at the moment of consummation,

and the long labour of changing the rain and the light

into a time capsule for a material kind of eternity

is over. Have I fulfilled my emptiness? Or come

to the end of a useful delusion I grew fond

of believing? Whizzed past forty, made

a pitstop at fifty to check the oil and tank up

but sixty-five’s some kind of broken wagon wheel

on a black prairie after a grass fire swept through

the night before. Adequate to all the other

eras, ages, and nightwatches I’ve kept

oceanically enough to ring the hour and shout out

to the stars that couldn’t care less overhead

all’s well, I’ll stare this estrangement in the eye

be it the mood of the fire, or an urnful of dragons.

Let it turn me to stone if it has to. I have

warrior eyes and courageous wounds that made

a fool out of me like Don Quixote charging windmills.

A habit of turning skulls over to see what’s

on the other side, however beautiful the moonrise is.

I was a boy. Now I’m an old man. Is one really

younger than the other and this sad, medicine bag

of a body, the elder of a cult of one? My bones

are firesticks. My heart a cold firepit where

the Council of the Three Tribes used to sit

at the meeting place where the sacred rivers join.

So many friends, ex-lovers, objects of gossip

have died over the past ten years of probable odds,

you can’t help counting the number of springs

and autumns left to you on the abacus of new moons

that can be numbered on your fingers and toes if you’re lucky.

More declination than right ascension, I’m conjugating

time like a Latin verb, sum, es, est, though soon enough,

eram, eras, erat. Fact. Why deny it? This

is what it’s like to die as if your fingers were

being pryed open to make you let go of things

like flowers. My eyebrows are trying to

gently persuade me my eyes are going the way

of blackberries and dusty blue grapes in early October.

My seeing’s beginning to realize how organic it is.

The telescope rots. The lens fogged in by snow.

The heart’s a benign terrorist and cancer’s moving

further east like a Mississauga rattler under

the rose-hips of the cold sores on your lips

though you haven’t had a pimple in thirty five years.

Now it’s a matter of cracks and creases as the air

slowly leaks out of the bladder of skin you hoped

would keep you afloat like Bouncing Bet, or Lady at the Gate.

I chafe like a feral dog at the short leash my body

chains me to. I’d rather burn the kite than

haul it back in like some fish I trained to obey me.

Things have come to mean so much it’s suicide to care.

Kids have jumped ship. Women have thrown

a lot of rings off burning bridges, achievements

have grown no less ambivalent, and awards are filth.

Freer than I’ve ever been, within and without,

but the isolation is galactic in scope, and o

the lavender lies that cling to the light

like a patina of soap, bubbles in a hurricane

of thorns that swarm in plagues of killer bees.

The toybox is empty. The cupboard almost

as much fun. The government finally pays me

for being who I am, though I still don’t feel

I’ve ever been approved of. Did you love me, Mum?

Or did I remind you too much of my father?

Still a poet after fifty years. That might count

for something. Never wanted you to be disappointed

by what you gave birth to. Might be unlovable

but I’ve mastered the art of being dangerously wise

as a broken window with a liberated field of view.

I got out of the egg. I know how big the sky is.

Might be people I’m dead to, not yet born,

will look upon me as an eyesore they couldn’t

get rid of, they’ve stared at so long, given the way

things turn around, they begin to accord me,

as strange as I seem, an air of original charm.

My heartwood might have been a pulp mill

but my poems all have tree rings and birds

in the branches, and even in winter, the full moon

for a blossom of apple bloom in an ice age.

PATRICK WHITE

PRECIPITATE WOMAN, STAR SAPPHIRE

PRECIPITATE WOMAN, STAR SAPPHIRE

Precipitate woman, star sapphire, crystal elixir

distilled from the nebularity of your saddest disguises

when your eyes weep like lonely windows

from your doe-skin medicine bag. Is your heart bad

or just bruised? Fire-sylph languishing in the ashes

of your deepest desire, or disappointment taken

by surprise you’d have to sink bells deeper

than you have to sing like a drowned mermaid

to the lovers you left dog-paddling in your wake

still in denial you didn’t swim back to rescue them?

Male. I am. Fool? Only by my own hand. Born

to succumb to the female principle of the world

I’ve built no temples in my honour beyond

the occasional gravestone to mark the miles

I’ve endured this dream of mine to love

and be loved, though you can’t say that without

feeling kind of hokey, nevertheless, it’s a doorway

to a good guess. I’m an unsigned loveletter

without a return address, sealed in blood and roses

and a harvest of thorns in eclipse I threshed

with my heart like a matador tearing his cape

on the horns of the moon because only

by their fruits can you know them like wine

trashed in the sands of an hourglass that smashes

like the Pleiades against the skull of Taurus.

I’ve been watching your eyes lie for hours now

as they had to without harming anyone, from

the other side of the room and I know you’re dangerous.

You know how to keep the dead in their graves

and somehow make them feel relieved about it

as if their lightning wasn’t up to the storm

though you were amused by the way they thundered

like a distant windfall of ghost dancers at dawn.

I was many lightyears out at sea before

a pink morning warned me I was out of my depths

as the waves rose and fell like the breasts

of a woman sleeping beside me oceanically

on the moon, her hair like a willow on the edge

of a precipice where lovers leapt to their deaths

as the lesser of two consummations of suffering.

I see the infernality of your avatar in an orphanage

of forlorn voodoo dolls, and the mistrust

of your longing to traffic in lust for the sake

of a taste of love that might still blossom

in the heart of the apple that fell to the ground,

the taste of stars in the fertile crescents of sex

that open gates of mud brick glazed with lapis lazuli

and towers that stand like lighthouses in wet deserts.

Moonrise in the black lace of the treeline, I’m

not immune to the persuasion of your lunar mirages

but now that I’m older, fire-master of the dragon

I used to be, I’m a distinguished pyre that doesn’t

burn easily for anybody that can’t steal me

like fire from the gods I’ve neglected to worship

for the better part of a life I’ve lived as if

I were chosen to thrive in exile like a noble pariah

that placed no faith in the religious superstitions

of his long fall to paradise without a shadow of proof

to show for it except these nightshifts of solitude

where I hammer out stars on the anvil of my heart

into a bestiary of extinct zodiacs, sundials

like lapwings and swords of moonlight I mean

to give back to the waters of life in due course

they were once wounded by without spite or remorse.

PATRICK WHITE

DEATH UNDOING WHAT LIFE CREATES AS QUICKLY

DEATH UNDOING WHAT LIFE CREATES AS QUICKLY

Death undoing what life creates as quickly

to transcend its own dismantling, the windfall flesh

perishing into the seeds time will disclose

like eyes on one last roll of the dice

it had up its sleeve to play for all or nothing.

The same bell that celebrates the wedding

mourns the funeral. Like the human heart,

don’t you think, systole, diastole, the pace

of our walking on tear-soaked leaves alone

through the early October woods, this house of life

the tenants haven’t finished moving out of yet

like a homeless zodiac that’s decided it’s cheaper

to live in snake skin tents the moon sheds

like a calendar of doom with the date circled

in red, faceless among ghosts of unravelling mists

that move to a mysterious music of their own

than be overwhelmed by events heaped up

by ants digging a grave for somebody they’ve

built a tel for that reeks of formic acid,

the breath of an undertaker on a blind date

with death. Is this a killing zone, or

an emergency room at the hospital on a full moon

at harvest time when things come undone, ritually?

Cold mystery. Physics is psychology. Writing poems

is a kind of eloquent pathology that parses

the dream grammar of the art it took to see such things

in the fall of a leaf your blood shuddered

at the ease of the razorblade of the breeze

that slashed your heart with the myriad nuances

of that terrible word, once. Eyeless insights

into the draconian cruelty of empathizing

with our own mortal remains in the dissolution

of the mirages we pleaded with to drink

the waters of life from the begging bowls

of our own cupped hands held out like a lifeboat

when please didn’t mean a thing and thank-you

was unheard of. Shipwrecked in our insular solitude

like the echo of an unanswered prayer

by the things we were most in search of,

be it love, or power over life and death

as if you could turn the wheel and irrigate

the fields at will. Market your excess

like a gift you sold for next to nothing

that left you with nothing to give when

the spirit moved you to the next chakra

like a bead on an abacus that found you wanting.

Processional danse macabre of the Byzantine

silver Russian olives bidding their mechanical birds

good-bye in a turmoil of failed diplomacy

shredding its leaves like the papers

of a persecuted embassy on a tinker’s moon

heading south with the hearses and urns of Canada geese.

A reckless green mood of moss covers the rocks

and the north side of second growth senescence

like a thick carpet in a plush funeral parlour

where everybody talks as if the dead were listening

to what they chose to ignore or couldn’t

bring themselves to say about their own fates.

Sometimes, it’s rare but it happens, you want

the dead to shout right out loud in your face

it’s ok, it’s ok, don’t disgrace the darkness with your fear

of what’s foreshadowed with the sun behind you all the way.

But they never do. They just maintain the grim silence

of prophetic skulls in a cemetery of hearthstones

ghost dancing around the firepits and middens

the mysterious mundanities of the days and nights

we made a racket of our soft-spoken clay, a riot

of insight into the constellations that flashed over head

like exquisitely jewelled insects frenzied

by the madness of the lives we carried to extremes

like a sunset in a lantern to the cremation of our starmud.

Prodigies of the unanswerable interrogations

we confess to, nevertheless, for form’s sake,

to back up the alibis that rolled over on us

like the stone of a planet over the tomb

of the dark mother the moment we were born.

All the exuberant flowers I loved basking among

like swimmers on the shore of the lake

when my heart needed to be vastly distracted

from the abyss my emptiness was adapting to

like a trap door spider without any safety nets.

Something simple and profound as

the extraordinary ordinariness of life going on

all around me in the bliss of the moment

as evanescently evident as a reason to despair,

mindlessly exhilarated watching the moon shooting

the rapids of the willows going over the edge

of their own waterfalls like maidens of the mist

in a nebular love affair with the early death of the rain.

Life’s the first draft of a shabby loveletter

that goes on revising itself forever autumn

after autumn like the long riverine sentences

of our periodic tears washing the dust of our starmud

out of our eyes and ears, the mouths that shape space

like emptiness into a cup that runs out and runs over

like a skull with a crack in it mended by gold

from the deepest motherlodes of dark abundance

as if to say even in the fall when the lakes

are left to themselves, and no one reads

the journals of the leaves on the theme

of a mindstream wandering in the woods at night alone

even now, there’s a broken beauty to the way

the heart aches to made more than whole again,

less without fault than the innocence of death

healing its own imperfections by falling away

from itself like the veils of the willows from

the waters of life concealed by the flowing

arcana of change as this old, strange rendition of death

casts no shadow on the unmarred face of its own refection.

PATRICK WHITE

WISTFUL MELANCHOLY, UNFOCUSED HELL

WISTFUL MELANCHOLY, UNFOCUSED HELL

Wistful melancholy, unfocused hell. When

you get here, this hour upon you, this station

of ruinous freedom you longed for and attained,

extreme evanescence without the body for restraint,

nebular without any stars to show for it,

long past the beginning and too far to finish,

nothing to give up and even less to hang on to.

Everything you cherished and probably still do

enough to hurt you, keep suckering you back

into life as if you were being taught to walk

all over again by reaching out a few steps

further and further and further for what you want,

leaves you feeling undernourished, knowing

there’s no food for it you can eat with the same relish

you once tore at the flesh of an apricot

like the moon low on the horizon with your teeth.

The savage act of a mysterious, elusive life

that couldn’t be trivialized by an explanation

of its vital signs pulsing underground

as it lost interest in singing the dead up

from the grave when grief, even elegantly articulated,

fruitively matured into understanding how

it demeaned them by believing they weren’t

happy where they were, a windfall at the roots of it all.

Life shrugs. Things fall off your shoulder

like an avalanche of chips and bluebirds, angels

and demons who always had the better argument,

rank, identity, the world, a snowflake, the hair

of a woman you once loved so passionately

even then, when the dragon’s roar was fire,

you knew it would end with you feeling this way

one night like the long shadow of a bliss

that wouldn’t be bliss if it were to last

more like a watershed than a shotglass.

Still fall. Black walnuts rotting on the sidewalks

like bubbles of soot. The monarchs don’t sip

from the milkweed pods anymore, and that

stubborn little flower, chicory, just won’t give up,

however many times they bush hog the highway.

Stems detached from their leaves like

the slender bones of birds all over the sidewalk

as if they were talking to each other in an alphabet

no one’s deciphered yet. Violet asters against

the burning wings of Magian sumac when

the fire-god comes looking for fire in a shrine

devoted to its ashes. The autumn’s a sad furnace.

And me? Maybe it’s because my hair’s turned white

and the crow’s no longer dyed by shadows of moonlight,

I feel like a landscape smothered under the white noise

of wet snow. Not quite death but as close as you can go.

PATRICK WHITE

WITCHING THE SILENCE OVER THE CAULDRON OF THE TOWN

WITCHING THE SILENCE OVER THE CAULDRON OF THE TOWN

Witching the silence over the cauldron of the town

as the air conditioners shut down for the fall

and everybody feels something slushy

in their hearts like a bruised apple or

a rotten strawberry with unshaved stubble

or an exhumed moon whose fingernails

kept growing like a calendar of last crescents

after it was dead, as arthritic hour hands

reached out to cripple what they could not grasp.

He knows this madness well. Long, inbred

winter nights. Crazy farmers when the night’s

just right sowing the woods like the wind

from its seed bag, hanging on to the tail

of a black bull guiding them through the dark

like a new moon in early October before

the first frost freezes like a ghost to everything.

He lived up in Ardoch once and after two years

started to think like a rock. Hardness

made sense and the solid took precedence

over the real like a deer being bled

on a resurrected tv tower on a hill of skulls.

Recollected emotions like back hoes

and glaciers in tranquillity when the ground

he was standing on was too hard to bury the dead.

Smelt in the spring laid out before

eighty year old men with bibs on at the Last Supper.

Arctic cats in heat outside the lodge in winter.

He lived in a defunct hardware store in Fernleigh,

land of the bracken and the Shee, and sold wildlife paintings

to Pennsylvanians in the summer driving along

the 409 where Kashwakamak Drive meets the highway

and the cops parked to keep an eye

on the annual Outlaws’ three day pig roast.

The more surrealistic his life became

the more he understood magic realism.

He interfaced with the locals like a totem pole,

painting ferocious logos on the windshields

of their snowmobiles snarling like chainsaws.

He saw a black bear on its back, perfectly intact,

roadkill with rigor mortis, an overturned table,

an old fashioned bathtub with its legs and claws

sticking straight up in the air, desecrated

by its posture as the locals gathered to gawk

at something so powerful even in death

he was estranged by the darkness of the silence

that overtook him like an eclipse of the sun.

And the hydrolines strung out over the lake

the garden ran down to at the back of the store

hummed like spinal cords in the summer rain

like the staves of a musical snakepit thumbing a guitar

as Goldlilocks, the blonde minister’s daughter,

ran off with the bikers like an apostate religion.

He had a young wife with ingenuous breasts

as beautiful as a marijuana crop in the fall

to a rip off artist that plagiarized his macho

from comic books. Behind the deathmasks

fools wear to scare themselves into bullying

things they seek from the weak who won’t

speak up for themselves, is a crueler intelligence

alloyed like a sword with the lesser metal

of the inferiors its infernal power base is founded on.

He played Vulcan chess with a wolverine

who made sure none of the pawns on the board

took his queen for one of their own. He painted

six packs of wolves for the bandit pope of Fernleigh

who kept things impiously honest between them

and more than a bird bone flute fascinates

a king cobra, maintained a truce with a poetic mongoose

though you won’t find either listed in any guide

to the local flora and fauna. Nevertheless it’s wise

to be prepared for any contingency when

you’re out in the woods with a French easel

and a wife whose turn it is to be independently wrong

about the way the light falls on a dangerous face

wearing its character inside out like a police mugshot.

PATRICK WHITE

O WHAT A DELIGHT IN LIFE IT IS

O WHAT A DELIGHT IN LIFE IT IS

O what a delight in life it is just to sit here

following my mind down to the river

on the deerpaths of wherever it takes me

as I flow along like a shadow in the wake of myself.

The sky is urgent with sparrows above

the fretting woodshed of another year

without dry wood. My kind of devotion

to a life that’s been living me like the hagiography

of an exhumed poet from the sixteenth century who died

in blissful penury not ever knowing

if he were discovered or not. No matter

he wrestled with his own shadow like the angel

in the way, creative contention is the usual mode

of life going offroad to get around things

like rocks in the waterclock of the mindstream

listening to dangerous explanations suggested by Shakespeare.

I keep wondering what kind of a mirror of magistrates

do I compare my mind to to suspect behind my back

I’m sophisticatedly crazy? Things only

seem to make a surrealistic kind of sense

that leaves me feeling existentially estranged

on a less habitable planet than the one

I thought I landed on in a homier atmosphere

than this abyss I’m multiversally immersed in now

shedding yellow leaves from other worldly elm trees

that exhilarate me as if I were falling with them

like gusts of Canada geese descending on a cornfield

the tractors have trampled like hogs and cattle

after the moon’s been husked like a pearl. A civilization

based on agriculture with nothing to eat.

I’ve always pursued an earthly excellence

in the name of remaining true to my folly

as an exercise in how to live wholly as a human

while I’ve still got enough instincts about me

to know it standing on an immodest escarpment

getting lonelier and lonelier the longer

I look at the stars as I have since I was a boy

with such longing to go there I cried myself

to sleep every night for three years realizing

I was born too early to be actualized by my dreams.

I’m dancing through beartraps in a marijuana patch

the spectrographs, the bikers and the ultra lights

missed by a hair on an emission spectrum

that coloured the whole affair like science fiction

but please don’t take my metaphors too literally

or attribute them to a lack of ardent conviction.

I’ve never got any i.d. on me when a traffic light

stops to ask me who I am and it cuffs me

like a crosswalk when I tell it I don’t

have a credible answer it would be inclined

to believe anymore than I can bring myself to anyway.

Must be the autumnal freedom of creative decay

that makes me think I can get away with things like that.

I’m sleepwalking in the dream of a junkyard bear

in deep hibernation in a niche of the earth

wasting my fat on votive candles I’m trying

to keep lit in the greenhouse I enshrined

like a water palace with as few impurities in it

as I could manage with a manual pump and a housewell

for a heart. Northern pike eyeing you under the ice

in winter like submarines under what’s left of the Arctic ice cap.

Minnows running the rapids of the spring run-off

before all the snow’s melted down to the knees

of a scarecrow’s blue jeans, I don’t have to be happy

to take a delight in the solitude of my own nature.

Like the shrew or the deermouse or the bedraggled

white tail buck unnerved by the wolves

that have drifted like hungry snow across its tracks

as if their noses were the spearheads of a ouiji board,

or any other creature befuddled by the urgency

of being excruciatingly here to wonder as if

wonder were a solitary form of worshipping

what comes as naturally as flowers to a beloved’s grave

as if they could say things about life only

the most perishable could whisper to the dead

in the full light of day and have them believe it,

I live elementally on the edge of extremes

and rebuke my abstractions with compassion

for everything that lives as I do, and everything does.

Don’t be fooled by the false idols again.

The priests eat their food for them and swallow

and the angels at the door were born without appetites.

What I despair of is always so much more intriguing

than what I hope for I’m always a shadow shy

of shining. I enter through the exit door

as if dawn were the beginning of a prolonged farewell.

And I’m best met at twilight with Venus in the west.

Life should turn away from me more often than it does.

I can think like a bell when I need to, but not until

the demonic clarification of my sensual inebriation

as a man coming to terms with looping back on himself

as if the future were already behind him

and the past had yet to come like the ghost

of the present that haunts this derelict house of life

like a train whistle way off in the distance,

does the incredible sadness of being alive

in a universe that doesn’t cherish what it labours

so effortlessly to perfect move you just as equinoctially

to love life with an autumnal tenderness

for what’s savaged like a sacrifice at a bad harvest

as well as the foolishness of the negligently enlightened

taking possession of their own emptiness hand to mouth

scooped out of the begging bowls of their cranial detachments.

Burn to love like an affirmative protest of the way we are.

Don’t feign a tear under the third eye of a warrior clown

but be in no doubt about what flowers and dies

on the waters of life like an unanticipated surprise.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN THOUGH IT'S ONLY THE CANADA GEESE

EVEN THOUGH IT’S ONLY THE CANADA GEESE

Even though it’s only the Canada geese

moving like prayer beads and caravans

out of a white Sahara of snow to come,

it’s still a child’ first night in hospital alone,

abandoned, it’s still the electric dagger

of separation in the hand of an assassin

you raised as one of your own. Native

absentia around a wounded firepit

that died like a besieged town from within.

The last waterbird flying out of the cauldron

of Stalingrad as the sixth army looks upon

the futility of its glory disappearing into

the distance as it’s about to be boiled

like a kid in its mother’s milk. Seig Heil

like an hour hand at midnight at the stroke

of doom. Goose-step your way into

the cooking pot. The wasps in the apple-orchard

grow nasty and then they’re numb

as frozen semi-colons on the windowsill

or as the Arabs say, the first to get angry

loses. When the last lifeboat’s left, drown

in your own isolation like a beach in paradise

or learn to swim through fire out of your depths

like hot diamonds on ice, or a meteor

with life inside making a quiet impact

in Antarctica like the stem cell of another

roll of the dice we carved from the skull

of the moon as if we were poaching mammoth tusks

like the first and last crescents of an extinct species.

Insulated by hibernal modernity from the elements.

Distracted by the labyrinths of loneliness

we wander in, convinced we’re getting somewhere

that’s always better than here, but when

you hear the geese high overhead at night

as you have a thousand times before you can’t help

but hear something sad, wise, intractable

in the calling of a wounded voice ancient

with farewells. It’s a funeral march. It’s a requiem.

It’s a dying trumpeter swan in the sunset

addressing the dead it too will soon forget.

This autumn I listen to the fireball whiskey

raging like old drunks sitting like flying buttresses

at the bar, exaggerate the fire-power

in the hearts of last year’s campaign

consigned to the pages of history now

like leaves to the duff and detritus

of the archival forest floor acidic

with slippery calendars caked together

like leeches bleeding the autumn to break

the fever like war with a scalpel big as a bayonet

and a doctor’s certificate to be absent without leave

like the shedding trees when it’s harvest time

in East Anglia and Harold’s medieval army

has to leave at precisely the wrong moment

to bring in the sheaves and split the heartwood

with a diamond cutter’s eye for how

it cleaves so much easier when the blood freezes.

Undone in the midst of chaos. The maples

are throwing their colours down on the ground

like a half mast that took it too far down

when it came time to surrender and begin

to befriend the beauty of autumn in the ruins.

Pillowed in goosedown snow in an empty nest

isn’t going to insulate us from what we dream,

though we hope for a good night’s rest,

when it’s colder than blood on the snow outside

and the wind in blue wode empowered

by a moon that asks no quarter and gives none,

doesn’t hit the window like the soft thump

of a sparrow or a snowball but shrieks like a demonic she-wolf

baring its snarling icicles like the fangs of chandeliers

barn dancing with scarecrows and strawdogs

in an ice storm making a frontal assault

on hospitalized emergencies behind a gated parking lot.

Stragglers of the wild grapevines flambeed

like brandy you don’t need a gasmask to breath

the bouquet of as it vaporously sublimates

like a good year for metaphors that cut to the quick

like the ghosts of past autumns cradled in your hand.

Like the bubble of a crystal snifter warming up to you

like a skull it gets easier to believe as the night wears on

as if the last ice age were a distant relative

you discovered you had in common too late

to make everything you carefully prophecied come true.

Canada. The meeting place of frozen rivers

and flying saucers come to pick up the survivors

of 1111 stamping out encoded s. o. s.s on

the shrinking ice-floes of dispossessed polar bears.

My mother used to tell me when she was

an Australian artist in the American Red Cross

as red-bellied zeroes were flying over Brisbane

dropping pamphlets like gum tree leaves when

it’s spring in the northern hemisphere

to terrorize the indigenous citizens with nightmares

too implausibly conceivable to be believed,

everyone agree the next war would be fought

in Canada like the arising of the great black snake

in Blake’s cold-blooded, prophetic poem, America.

I’ve wondered superstitiously about that since

I first heard it. Who dislikes a peacekeeper

selling treaties to the natives like real estate

with reservations on the moon like Grey Owl

pretending he wasn’t English enough to be eaten

by the queen or a culture molesting Catholic school

beatifically blaspheming a mother tongue

that wasn’t allowed to speak up for her children

when they cried out in their sleep like the Ojibway

word for pain when a snowman puts its hand

over their mouths to smother the fire in smoke

like Zyklon B as if they were smudging a peacepipe

with sweetgrass for tourists who want to get back

to the inhuman nature of the way things used to be?

Remember when the beaver were skinned

to sit on the heads of Europe like stovepipes

and lampshades that slapped their tails

at the first sign of a wolf nosing around

their lodge poles with an heraldic device?

Brebeuf burned at the stake by the heretically innocent

who refused to be demonized imperiously

by a civilized bestiary of xenophobic totems?

PATRICK WHITE