TURN TOWARD THE STILLNESS

TURN TOWARD THE STILLNESS

Day 10: Months. In all probability. Cancer appears to have

metastasized. Biopsy in Kingston soon. Long shot. But one in a million

my very good doctor and friend informed me. With a very remote

possibility, at least, they’re going to try to extend my life expectancy

as far as they can. Not going to take it for granted though

and make hope a kind of mental comfort food. Don’t want to die

a fat-minded man. The odds aren’t good, but I’ve been running bad odds

most of my life just to keep the show on the road as a painter, a poet,

and my small boy’s notion of being a man. All I want to do, as I said

somewhere else here on fb recently is look this dragon in the eye

and see what there is to love about it and keep enough

of my wits about me to sing it lullabies at night which I will,

no doubt, post to fb each day for as long as I can, because

it helps, it really helps, never doubt it, to know you’re there.

We don’t live our lives in isolation hough I’m sure many like me,

have convinced themselves they do, at times. Born unloveable or something, which, of course,

especially from what I’m learning these days, in all humility,

release, shining and deep appreciation is not true. Impossible.

The way we’re connected to each other here, the way all life is,

who can deny it, holy. Blake’s right. Everything that lives is holy.

And I would add, without presumption, everything lives. Rocks, too.

But I’m not running off to church. This sad, this is heavy,

and I know I’m your brother more than I ever have before in my life,

and as we neither live together here alone in the world,

nor do we die alone, so, to varying degrees of imagination

and depth and experience, in a sense, I know and feel acutely

through your many loving comments and outpouring

of compassion, love, and empathy for the situation I’m in here

in front of this firing squad of stars, trying to figure out

who they’ve given the blank to, lol, this is just not my death alone

but everyone’s property as Rilke would have, and did put it.

And though I have no right to, I ask you of those who wish

to live it, not die it here along with me, and if you can’t,

or you don’t wish to, that’s ok that’s ok that’s ok, too.

Doesn’t change a damn thing. I still love you. As Dogen Zenji says

so beautifully somewhere, not all the flowers open at the same time,

and once I grew up enough to understand that, certainly

haven’t tried to pry them open before they’re time.

Green bough.

Dead branch.

Same song.

Blossoms once.

Blossoms gone.

The moon blooms in winter.

It took me twenty years to write that. Finished it last night

at five in the morning sitting in the dark

feeling things.Who says I can’t write short poems?

Which, course, I can. You just haven’t seen them yet.

Turn toward the stillness. Sapphire lady of my soul,

let go, let go. The fire descends. The wind’s stopped for awhile.

Gusts. Gusts of stars. As Rilke says. About nothing

but in that nothing all the rivers, all the deserts, gusting

like stars again. It’s a kind of dance, you can feel it that way.

Things sway as if they were on a swing, a spider web,

a suspension bridge, a branch. Can you feel that just a whisper

and a wavelength away? The solitude of a snake with

melancholy? Sad snake. Willows. Willows are good at this,

much better than waterfalls that don’t sway as much, move

in the groove with moshpit waltzers, funny thing to say

but it’s true. Think of all the things you’ve said

you’d love to in your life, and they’re swaying, their swaying, I swear.

So much I wanted to be, achieved, but blindly.

I should have been more gentle with the mirrors.

I shouldn’t have laughed, ever, about anything

without a tear in it. And an antidote. Elixirs and eclipses

happen all on their own but the calendar thinks they’re predictable.

Could be so, but that’s not been my experience.

This is. Shining in the dark with stars, candles and fireflies

that look like the women I’ve known like vases and urns

you can’t plant flowers in you can ever give back again.

More of a gift than anything I’ve ever earned before.

I’m learning to sway with rain river reeds, little pills

and supernovas, seastars and the Circlet of the Western Fish

as if we were all learning to play the guitar together, every man

and woman for himself, together again, pain or no pain,

or a promoter of health that’s discovered it’s all healthy

even when it’s terrible. Every blade of stargrass. Herb.

And, yes, even the carnivorous moon with her royal flush

of talons and a torn bird. Be good. Be bad. Be inquisitive.

Be kind. Be still. Be silent as the wind blows through the cave

and you’re sure it’s a spirit. Don’t teach the trees sacrilege.

You get the point. There is none. You have to make one.

And stick to it like the capitol of a country somewhere

in your afterlife like the future memory of a prophecy that came true.

Me I like the trees swaying, cold aspen leaves, flames

of the sumac singing phoenix songs around a fire the ghost dancers

will tell you had nothing to do with it. But they could be wrong

about that. I’ve known root fires sing the same song

until an apple blossom came along and knocked them off their feet.

Got to say it, too sweet for me as I aged, more isolation

in the cellar, and the dreams heat up and blood grows darker

than any night it’s ever known before. But the stars,

what could even Buddha Pinocchio say about the stars

without making a fool of himself he intended? The blood sees

what your nose smells and you can trust it. You’ve got to

percolate the wine sometimes. Put bubbles in it outside around a fire

you really need. Give the dragon some respect. Dragons

bleed sunsets with no regrets that aren’t true. Lizards

are another matter, but it’s ok if they’re blue and they’re swaying.

PATRICK WHITE  

YOU KNOW WHAT A SEA OF POEMS IS LEAKING OUT OF ME

YOU KNOW WHAT A SEA OF POEMS IS LEAKING OUT OF ME

You know what a sea of poems is leaking out of me,

maybe it’s a hemorrhage, or the road’s just flooded out by the beavers

for every raindrop I can catch with my tongue?

Blackberries are saturating a butcher’s apron

like my mother’s wound I’m bleeding for inside.

Carried it all my life like legal scar tissue

I hid like a switchblade in my boot. What happened?

Did we live through it or is this just the black box

of the wreck? I wanted nightingales for you

but the creeping finality of this conversation is just going to have to do.

Like everything else. Demolition rainbows. Isn’t that a clever thing

for your smart ass literary son to say? Cause it hurts

so bad I don’t know what else to do. What do I do, Mum?

It seems I’m a sixty-five year old man with cancer.
What other patinas of time can I hide behind like a Parliament Hill

copper roof trying to green the bloodstains away

as if they weren’t ripe enough to eat yet? Bitter pills.

Are you still sawing flower pots out of plywood

for the umbilical cords of the yellow roses

to cover those shabby brown shingles of a house

coiled like a brown snake in its scales on your pillow back

in that secret garden you kept stashed away in your mind

like Eden in Stanthorpe? Or was it a refugee camp
I used to watch you sneak back into through

a hole in the fence, and I never asked to come. Not once.

They were your blackberries. Your jewellery box.

Or all those Evening in Paris perfume bottles I used to bring you

for a day that never came, stuffed away in blue steamer trunks

like amphorae at the bottom of a classical shipwrecked cemetery?

Were you trying to strangle it in the womb with a noose around its neck?

Were you trying to make a snake bloom? You can’t

train snakes to bite other people, but you already know that.

The equanimity of your silence condemns me, how ancient it is,

like a sphinx at a lion gate of Sekhmet whose

been looking at things a long time now, come and go,

like life and sons and landlords, social workers, cops,

ambulance staff with mobile emergency signs

screaming like banshees back to the hospital

you just came from to have your thyroid out

when the scalpels slashed you across the throat

like a big, happy face with stitches. Me, I’ve got

tumours with diaper rash. Remember the blackberries

where the beer bottles were buried in the Sikh woodlots

oceans of wood away we sailed like wood pile pirates once

among the deflated liferafts of the used condoms?

And laugh about it, didn’t we? At how

we had to survive like Roumanian Roma in Europe,

laugh at ourselves like Picasso’s Les Saltimbanques,

forlorn, but sometimes we were, weren’t we,

we were, we were, gleeful and together for awhile

just to have gotten away with it? Forget about the hampers.

Any well trained mutt can learn to appreciate dogfood.

I wanted poetry for you. That’s why I never wrote a novel,

unless you asked me to. Wrote two and stuck them in drawer

to give back to the church so we didn’t owe them our souls

like any other debt collector at the door with his big, red paintbrush,

and the letter X. Rejects. Plague year. 1348.

Enough of that. More to come. Give it a break.

Thanks for all the loggers knees you ever sat on

for milk for me. Thanks for not letting me go

when you had a chance to. Thanks for snarling

in the face of pandering reasonableness while

you were giving suck to Rome. Thanks for

turning the fury of a bitch wolf loose on the Sunday school teacher

who stabbed me in the back with a pitchfork

for staring at him while he weeded the garden

through the third eye of a knot in the fence

that turned out to be a black hole into the heart

of a man who thought he was good, but wasn’t much

of an example. Seig heil. Onward Christian soldiers

marching on. That’s mean. The damage done at Nuremburg.

Thanks for the cool new clothes you bought me

in grade ten when I started school again. I know what that cost.

Can you still understand me, Mum, or do I still have a way

of standing things on their head like an hourglass

timing cosmic eggs? I want to be clear with you, so clear.

No more blood eagles as if I were a Viking or something

playing with lungs. I want to fold you in my arms

and just cry. Just cry. As if we were still sitting at the kitchen table.

Cry for all the agony and pain of what it takes

to be human here with twenty five bottles

of Evening Perfume in a blue steamer trunk in the basement.

Hope chest. Birthday cake with a file in it. You got

any clean sheets among all those mothballs in there

I can borrow for my next attempt at circumnavigating

membraneous hyperspace like the Magellanic Clouds?

I want to be close as a ghost of a son to you as I can be

with a southern cross, because you lived there once

and to hear you tell it, when I looked deeply into your face,

it made you happy. And God, that’s all there is,

or ever will be. Blackberries here and mangoes and magpies there.

The silliness of a son trying to tell his mother he loves her.

Let’s not say folly for a change. I’m sick of wisdom. Time for a pill.

PATRICK WHITE  

COUNTING THE HAIRS IN MY FIVE-TIERED, TERRACED RAZOR BLADE

COUNTING THE HAIRS IN MY FIVE-TIERED, TERRACED RAZOR BLADE

Counting the hairs in my five-tiered, terraced razor blade

trying to decide if this is the hanging gardens of Babylon

or life among the Incas at Machu Picha. Second hand

increments of time I’m threshing like a big, old paddlewheel

that’s a legend on the river of its own mindstream.

Maybe a wheat field. This one’s mine. It’ll do fine.

Good crop of sundials this year. And then the lean

silo of dreams that leave you as empty as one of the plagues

of Egypt. Black dwarf. Dark halo. Evil gill of blades

on a grey nurse and a thresher shark. I’ll lead them

across the desert to the Red Sea like a feeding frenzy

and drown them like pharoah’s chariots in their own blood.

How do you make a glacier part? Ice pick through the heart

like Trotsky in Mexico, or shave off some ice

with my new Fusion razor blades like Freddy Krueger

with his switchblade bouquet of pentagonal hands?

Time, ekaksana, the sensation of a gap between

thoughts. What’s in there? Just thought I’d ask

because I just think I slipped through the cracks of one

like Castor and Pollux jumping into a chasm to save Rome.

Leucippus and Democritus, Romulus and Remus, Castor and Pollux?

God, there are a lot more twins in the world than I thought.

Things are a lot quieter now. Diesel percolating the coffee

outside my window while a trucker walks into a bank.

If you learn to play with your delusions correctly,

and Isadora Duncan in her fragrances of silk and northern lights,

or better yet, feathered boas, flying snakes, her veils, her veils, her veils.

Janis Joplin when her plumage was a flamingo on heroin

will back me up on this. Separation, not money

is the root of all evil. Evil doesn’t have a root on it.

That tree bears nothing but leaves. No fruit.

Squander your heart on the world if you want to make a big impression

on your bathroom mirror. Or your green room. Smooth. Clear. Aromatic

as a talced baby’s ass. But just remember you’re mowing weeds

not stargrass. Nicks and tics of a waterclock

pouring out of the hot water tap as you lather your face

in quantum foam and begin to shave like a wave

running up on the beach a little higher each time

the tractor turns around boustrophically to make

a labyrinth you’re trying too hard not be lost in

because you want to look as good and prepared

as any other corpse in Perth when you go out there.

That’s drastic. But probably true. But you never know.

Probably lets enough light through the storm shutters

of my hurricane, science fiction razor for small miracles

to show up on the powerlines like a sparrow making a pitstop.

Sometimes. Though I feel uneasy about relying upon that

because I don’t want to give any more offence to my karma

by putting out food for thought for a bluebird under the feeders

when it might be a turkey vulture unlacing an old boot of roadkill.

PATRICK WHITE  

I PAY MORE ATTENTION TO MY BODILY FLUIDS THAN I USED TO

I PAY MORE ATTENTION TO MY BODILY FLUIDS THAN I USED TO

I pay more attention to my bodily fluids than I used to.

Woodlore, paint spots, spoor. Learning to read all over

again. What does that mean? Show me an x ray

of my ancestors prophetic skulls’ hidden under the hearthstones

of the firepit I’m being consumed in like a piece of mammoth meat

that once thought it was phoenix in an ice-age.

Is it ready yet? Is it cooked? Spread it around.

Dinner time. May your crops and your colas never get bud rot.

Irish grace. Canadian style. But it’s still got

too many leprechauns in it, though, for my taste.

Ever see a red-tailed hawk wheeling and wheeling,

as if it couldn’t get a cork out of a wine bottle it was

trying to open, when, pop, the job is done, and it slides

down its own bannisters and thermals of air in a stairwell

of mirrors as if it were easier watching your blood

unravel in water because an eddy pulled it by the thread

of a rip cord on your emergency parachute. See

anything yet that looks like the moonrise of a mushroom yet?

And you watch this cinder in the sun’s eye, this crazy

flakey star that shines from the inside out

as if it emerged before Venus, of course it did,

the star doesn’t go on stage before the audience,

startling the soul over the road and the cedar rail fence

past the soft bass wood grove huddled up like refugess

against the border, birds on the powerlines,

trying to touch their mother’s fingertips through

electrical fish nets, you take it from there,

over the darkening hills at the end of the beaver marsh

with a treeline that’s putting too much mascara on.

Must be a young treeline. A whisper, honey, a whisper

of an eclipse, moonset on those eyelids of yours.

It’s a lot harder to seduce somebody with megaphone.

All those black holes. You shouldn’t have any trouble

attracting stars. But look at that hawk up there.

The way it spreads its wings out as if it were

the standard gold measure of the sun glowing down,

(Glowing. Cheap shot like the next rock in a mindstream

I jumping across, but I’ll take the risk.) Down

into an abyss where the Egyptians used to believe

it died and it was up to them with all their canopic jars,

ointments, and urns to make it rise again. Heavy burden.

Bet they were happy to get that calender of gravestones

off their chest. I can only imagine grave-robbing looters

running riot through the streets of New York

like debt collectors when there’s a black out orgy

of burning cars and smashed windows as if

they were beating their girlfriends up for having

such beautiful eyes, with bars and gates. Street orchids

booming in fire once every seven thousand years

and the fire hoses trying so hard to put them out

as if goodness and human decency depended up them

like a loaf of farmhouse bread cooling on an afternoon windowsill.

Of course, it does.As wide from horizon to horizon, as that bird up there,

stretching itself out to infinity so it can touch the sky

with the tips of its flightfeathers to see if he can fly out of it

without having out of necessity of optical misperception

as if the compass needle that runs through its heart like the axis

mundi, (God, I love the Latinate basso profundo of that

it makes me feel so smart I can almost convince myself

I’m thunder for a minute or two.) Ta da. A firefly

hits the transformer. Fireworks for a hawk. Watching it fly

as if there nothing more meaningful in the world than that.

Better stop here. I’m getting carried away. That’s

what a spinal cord’s for. To tug on a kite. Hold on tight.

Ghost of a windsock in an air pocket of the moon,

or anchored in bay with the gleaming fish hook allure

of the feminine principle of the world taking a bath in her own grave

and the merest speck of a hawk running down

out of her eye, the crumb of a dream, the bismallah

and the whole point in the mole on the cheek of what Hafiz longed for

nothing but a starmap of all there is to shining

if you approach it as if you were always on the inside of no way out.

PATRICK WHITE

A DEEPER INTIMACY, A DARKER SHEDDING

A DEEPER INTIMACY, A DARKER SHEDDING

A deeper intimacy, a darker shedding. The night,

the light, the moon, though it’s raining out, the solitude,

the hum of being in a human oasis for the night,

the bestial safety of it, fifty years of trying to keep

the lights on, and now this. What could anybody make of it?

The night is getting naked more like a snake than a mermaid?

I like that. Let people participate in the creative process

so they can see I make the same mistakes they do,

though I doubt for as long as it takes to walk

to the end of the widow walk and back,

nobody ever seriously doubted that. Or they shouldn’t

have. Not for a nanosecond. We’re all lost

if we’re not all wrong together thinking we know

where we are when we say that. Where are we now

if not beside each other huddling in the dark sometimes

like monkeys in the trees of a hundred million years ago

safe for the night somehow. Despite skills.

And the moon large and ancient over the plains

and the burning hills beyond cooling their eyes

in the weirdness of the hallucinogenic air

somehow seeming more clear than it usually does.

As if it just had to break through one more window

and the moon was outside running off somewhere

with Ryokan’s thief. This time he left the window open

for keeps. Things are never going to be the same.

Nothing is. Ever. Never. Forever. At least the warrant for all this is

not by my hand. I didn’t thresh myself. But I can’t

even be too sure about that. I wouldn’t put it past me.

I don’t trust my own deviousness. I’m a clever boy.

A Taj Mahal moment of quiet when the eclipses

go to sleep among the waterlilies on black starmaps

that smell and stain as if they contain the great mysteries

of life in their veins, but they’re quiet about it.

I see the moon on dark sapphire water, and the colour

of time in the mysterious peacock blue that’s letting

just a single one or two stars shine through,

and you don’t know what it is, and it’s the kind

of thing you wouldn’t say anyway to judge

by the way it puts the fingertips of the silence

and solitude to your lips and says, hush, can

you keep a secret? And I say, yes, I believe I can.

And another veil fails away like we’re getting somewhere.

I can see the eternity in the mystery since this space

has been here, and though seldom this clear, it does

happen out of nothing and nowhere, here

and lightyears away. Sharp. Radiant. Breaking. Emergent.

A spear to the heart. You fear this angel. It burns hot.

Sears your soul irreparably with blessing and fear.

I think of it as holy at times. At least as close as it seems

I’m ever going to get. But when I’m real clear,

as it seems I am now, I don’t think of it as anything.

I watch and I watch and I watch and I watch

until the bloom is off the light and then I make

my way through the night as best I can

like a very solitary creature at heart who doesn’t mind

knowing there’s something there so essential

and imperiously beautiful with no intention to be

but you can’t say what it is that haunts you

for a life time looking at this. It escapes you

like the golden fish in the pond at night. Quietly

firewalking their lives out in the waters of life they are

like a candle in a shrine that doesn’t know who it belongs to

but shines anyway, adds its firefly to the stars, and burns on

as if it were born with a million mirrors for eyes

and one, only one, the dark one, where everything abides.

PATRICK WHITE  

SLOW DOWN, SLOW DOWN

SLOW DOWN, SLOW DOWN

Slow down, slow down, look into

the golden eyes and crystal skulls of your soul.

No frenetic redshift, or the blue end of the spectrum

will think you’re stealing its thunder, stepping on its Texas toes.

Blue is an asp. Red is a king cobra that passes like a river

into the grass, but you know it’s there,

and you walk tentatively and you walk slow.

As if you’d just made a truce with

cause and effect, one and zero, or the hydro lines

up at Fernleigh buzzing in the rain where

they crossed the lake with no other music than this

hiss, on a musical stave on which no birds sang

like one of the signs of the last days in ibn Attar’s

twelfth century way of looking at things.

That’s a topic worthy of longer wavelengths

of thought, but we won’t go there until we hear

what the doctor says Friday after high noon

like a Gary Cooper movie walking out

into the bleak, bleached street of the sunshine. Draw.

Pow. Pow. Two tumours with one shot. I think I counted wrong.

Gave them names the other night. Scream and Silence.

Kids of my own. I’ll do my best to treat them right.

Gives a kind of classy ring to their names don’t you think?

Demonic personic psychodynamics of the mind

embodied like Romulus and Remus at the founding of Rome.

How many eagles is it going to take this time?

Two gods on earth, confusion in heaven, and a house

or a skull divided against itself like the cotyledon

of a scarlet runner cannot stand. But nobody

told the seeds that as they climb toward heaven

on their own flames up the axis mundi of the world.

Three poles of triune identity, more like a small fire

that’s catching on its own way, than an auto de fe

that’s going to bring my urn of ashes to heel,

o yes, o yes, but I’m going to keep my spurs on

like Aldebaran and Antares and Betelgeuse.

I’m a three spurred cowboy because I don’t want

to leave my third eye out of this, and every star in the sky

deserves its own eye, like children growing up

deserve a bedroom of their own. A place to run and hide.

Be alone with the Alone. As Plotinus called it.

Crazy mystic. Took himself way too seriously.

But then, again, he had to for the longest time

like a mainspring in an alarm clock until

he hatched it like a koan with a hot red egg

in its mouth. A musket shot. Anachronistic worlds in collision.

Not taking a meteor shower like a combination in the corner

looking for an extinction event among the right crosses.

But Scream and Silence seem to be getting along

with each other these days. Maybe I’ll hire a baby-sitter.

Go play for awhile. Too many farewells in these fingertips

that have been touching the world for the last time

to see how that feels, though I fear these dress rehearsals

like trampled grapes fear rumours of wine laced

with mushrooms like the moons of the Eleusinian Mysteries

on the edge of the wheat flood of Dionysus

dropping tiny spores of ergot in your drinks,

and out of control stampedes that trash your mind,

or the King of the Waxing Year fears body parts,

or Monsanto genetically modifies the crops.

Wonder what the moon thinks of that? And the almonds

and the bees? They must be freaked out by now.

PATRICK WHITE

I'M JUST FIGURE SKATING IN THE MOONLIGHT REFLECTED OFF THE SNOW

Day eight:

I’M JUST FIGURE SKATING IN THE MOONLIGHT REFLECTED OFF THE SNOW.

I’m just figure skating in the moonlight reflected off the snow.

I’m not a Kufic cursive script of blades trying to show off

because I’m not allowed to idolize myself in images.

Melodically, because I need to breathe the air

against my face like a woman’s hands taking pity on me

like a picture frame that enhances the scene

like a rung up from a postcard in the hierarchical

structure of things. It helps to move as freely as you can

while you’ve got the chance. I’m trying to.

Besides it’s beautiful to be out here in the cold at night

as if I were a Russian figure skater alone on

the Ottawa Canal, wondering what she’s doing now back home,

alone, alone, alone, you see, Ottawa’s still got a ghost

of a hope of a poet laureate and the rest of that crowd

is way too entrepreneurial for me. I was busy. But

I never carried a stockportfolio of a bibliography

like a bill board around in my arms to scare people

to a restaurant I liked or a board room I didn’t.

I was busy. But I wasn’t busy, busy, busy. Guess.

They’re poisoning them these days. Collapsed Colony Syndrome.

Hey, this might be a tauromachia, if it weren’t for the fact

it’s only the moon listening to the rasp of her blades on the ice write poetry.

Ice age runes. My own demotic. Is my dream

grammatically correct enough? I know it’s got typos.

And sunspots of cancer on its lungs like the spotted

trout lilies in spring, or the ash spotted sacred clowns

in a crouch at a Sioux ghost dance, way, way off

the reservation where all I’m doing, I swear to God,

is trying to keep my eighty-eights straight as figure eights

on the figure skates of a Moebius infinity sign

I learned in calculus a long time ago

when I thought it was curvaceously sublime

and wanted to know more poetically who she was.

I keep wreaking my neck trying to twist and turn

to see how she can manage to do that as if it were

no trick at all to reality like a bowtie firecracker blasting cap

I don’t mind I stepped on so much if it means I get to see her skate.

Muse or moshpit underneath it all. Anyway, she’s gone.

And I hope we get the chance to sit down one day

and talk about everything under the sun and the moon

full, not empty like this firepit of a happy face

someone put on a pentagular tab of bad acid that looks like

one of my pills. As if Dracula were buried under it.

And who knows? Maybe he is. Let him sleep in awhile.

He’s had a long night of syringes and knives

and spoons that jump over the moon because it rhymes.

Push off, on one leg, as if I were a swan in some other

summer triangle far away from here I saw once

at Blue Skies rise above the trees in the shadows away

from the midway of the stage in the great gulf of darkness beyond

that makes me think I’m a little tiny tintinnabulum of a man

going ding, ding, ding, like a heartbeat in a great symphony

that’s swept away by the first violins of the wild irises

rising to the crescendo of a bouquet they had to fight for

as if somebody had just given it to them for free on their grave

in case, you never know, they made need a spare pilot light one day.

Look at those swords. This isn’t Cincinnatus in a rhetorical painting.

They’ve been to war. Those aren’t feathers. Maybe the talons

of a terrible bird. But I wouldn’t fall on one if I were you.

You might hurt yourself without meaning to.

I stroke my cat under the chin as she looks at me

skating back from the kitchen in a ridiculous image of myself

the way I like her to, on the futon, uncoiling herself

like a bucolated curl of an eddy on a river stretching out

from a warm sleep in the amber satisfaction

of being happy and at peace with herself and me

and life for awhile, three bells, all’s well, get back

to your dreaming. I’ll call or fall if anything happens.

How many cats I wonder have walked beside humans

like this as undemanding companions who want

something all the time, but you don’t mind,

because the way they ask it of you makes you rejoice

in being alive to give it them as if it were a great privilege

bestowed upon you to be needed by another living enttity.

And you know what? It is. Not drastic. Not plastic.

Refreshingly simple and ordinary like oxygen and bread

were meant to be originally, poppies and wheat

and figure skaters and cats waking up from a nap.

Like the way I turned that corner? Watch this. How’s that?

Not catastrophic images of the dead, but life going on as it is

to astound you with the moves it can make when your heart jumps

and you risk the double-lutz and don’t care if you fall flat on your face.

Happens to pancakes all the time. Buildings, too, I hear.

That were once able to leap over themselves in a single bound.

PATRICK WHITE