TEN PAGES, LITTLE BROTHER

TEN PAGES, LITTLE BROTHER

Ten pages, little brother,

for your edification

and our mutual illumination

but I look forward to the night

when I think of you

and what you’re doing to yourself

and it’s a haiku.

PATRICK WHITE

NO SLEEP AGAIN TONIGHT

NO SLEEP AGAIN TONIGHT

No sleep again tonight.

Not haunted by anyone.

Not troubled by love

or the lack thereof.

Nevertheless

stuck by pins like a voodoo doll

in the hands of a spiteful lepidopterist.

By poisonous flying insects of insight

like a fire in a jungle at night.

Indigestible menus of life

that just don’t sit right in my belly.

Butterflies and starmaps.

I’m an experimental lightbulb

with a six million volt lightning filament

in Nikola Tesla’s lab.

I’m an over-reactive inner core nuclear meltdown

of a demonic hydroelectric plant

overdoing my afterlife

trying to put the fires of hell out

with heavy water that turns to steam

whenever I try to walk on it.

Lights off.

Head on the pillow.

Gas pipes bang and crack.

Whump of car doors

slamming outside

connecting with a right to the ribs

like the corpse of a heavy body bag

that’s just had the wind knocked out of it.

Snap. Whump.

My pillowcase

Deploying like a parachute

that’s candled like an exclamation mark.

This is freefall.

This is a comet

this is a coma

this is a comma

that’s been igniting dry ice all day

but doesn’t know how to turn the lights out.

This is insane.

This is like sharing your waterbed

with an anaconda,

your coiled box spring

upholstered by summer thunderheads

with a snakepit

performing a fertility lap dance for lightning.

This is a waking wet dream

without a succubus.

When I crawled into bed

my two eyes had the following

of a soporific colon with popular sex appeal

but now I look at the clock

forty-five minutes later

than it used to be

and all I can see

are the fang marks my eyes left

between three digital numbers

that look as if the poison

is beginning to take effect.

And all I can do

as they slip off into never never land

is envy their toxicity

as I o.d. on my own brain activity

like a crackhead that hasn’t lost consciousness

since the early eighties went punk

The medium isn’t up to the message.

But with the snake-eyed luck

of the insomniac I’ve become

they’ll kill the medium

but not the messenger.

Rosy shades of champagne in the morning

on heritage field stone bank fronts

with ghastly logos of fire-engine red

and a sky growing bluer

than Botticelli by the moment

the harder I try not abhor the dawn

the brighter it gets

and the more I take it personally.

I hate the fucking Renaissance.

Ghosts have their graves to go to.

Vampires their blood banks.

Blind star-nosed moles

don’t suffer in daylight

the way I do.

Who shows up for the nightshift

at the crack of dawn?

False dawn.

Fraudulent candle.

Artificial light on a pot plant

trying to get some z’s in the closet.

The sun shines at midnight here.

It crowds the moon out.

It elbows its way like a cuckoo’s egg

into the corners of your eyes

and just sits there

like a lump on the ecliptic

making up alibis

in the face of the conspiracy theorists

who see plots hatching out everywhere

for world domination by the Illuminati.

Used to sleep like the dead.

My head on the pillow.

Gone.

Not even a dream for years.

Dark, dark, dark,

they all go into the dark blank oblivion

of being no one’s sleep

under so many eyelids

and they sleep like Rilke in the death

he so seductively preferred to life

as the greater intensity of the two

but from this wide-eyed point of view

who can blame him

and as far as I’m irritably concerned

any immediate immensity

that could consume me right now would do.

Wu shi. No mindedness.

I’m trying to throw midnight oil

on my troubled theta waves

to calm my oceanic consciousness

of being lost on the moon

in the Sea of Tranquility

without any way to drown.

I’m doing what the Buddha did

with less effort

thinking what isn’t thought

seeing what isn’t sight

hearing what isn’t heard

my whole head blurred

in a cloud of unknowing

and my bodymind sitting here

bolt upright at my desk

like a lightning rod

giving the sky the finger

attending without attention to this.

Sick of being a nightwatchman

and a sleepwalker by day

as acutely aware as Methuselah

that time is a repeating decimal.

Sick of being a first magnitude star

paled like a wall flower by the sun

a bloodshot albino leper streetlamp

with its third eye perpetually open

in a diurnal caste system

that puts too much emphasis

on enlightenment

but isn’t sage enough

to know when to shut it down.

Sick of being singled out

for the eyes in the back of my head

by the dream people

like the thirteenth hour

the thirteenth month

the tristadecaphobic floor

of the thirteenth house of a zodiac

where the elevator never stops

on its way up or down

like a third equinox of the sun

the rest of the family doesn’t talk about

to keep one eye on things

like a Cyclops with tunnel vision

and half a sleeping pill

to do the job of more opioids

than you could bleed

even under interrogation

from an entire Afghani poppy field.

Bright, bright, bright,

they all go into the light

but the rest I’m up for

looks more like a re-run

of the simulcast

of a saturnalian white night

in a blizzard of shattered glass

that makes the sound

of one Zen chandelier

break dancing in an ice storm.

Even the mirrors are noisy.

And if a brilliant insight

ever had a down time

this has got to be it,

one of those anti-eureka moments

when your eyes just don’t give a shit

if you had a fulcrum

and a lever long enough

you could move it off the dock.

I’m bushed. I’m whacked.

I’m wiped. I’m wired.

I’m so fucking tired

tar looks overactive to me

and the pyramids have a.d.d.

Nothing works.

The sun’s setting fire

to all my starmaps

and even the fireflies

have been cryonically frozen

like the genome of a new ice age.

A crackhouse in downtown L.A.

during a police raid

caught in a brush fire

in the middle of a 7.8 earthquake

on a digital Richter scale

gets more sleep than I do.

Or a drug cartel with attitude.

Or a hive of killer bees,

oversensitive to the sound

of anything it can swarm

like a shopping mall

a bus stop

a subway

a dairy cow

a classroom

a neighbourhood

a psyche

a toilet seat

a third world country

like riot police on Wall Street.

PATRICK WHITE

LAST TOKE OF THE NIGHT

LAST TOKE OF THE NIGHT

Last toke of the night.

Last cigarette.

Last coffee.

Thinks with his kind of luck

they’ll put a no smoking sign behind him

while he’s blindfolded

in front of a firing squad.

He takes the garbage out

at three in the morning,

puts his one seaweed green plastic bag

next to five others

from the insurance brokerage downstairs

leaning up against a one-eyed parking meter.

Desolate small town November streets.

The red coat Scotiabank

glares at him like a U-boat in Halifax Harbour.

One drunk moving from door way to doorway

like a waterclock from bucket to bucket

as if they were all connected in his mind somehow

in series, not parallel.

Abandoned things, leafless trees,

a bad hair day for the flowers

down in the dumps

with their municipally rustic whiskey barrels.

He remembers learning several summers ago

if you put the flame of a zippo

under the petals of the petunias

they change colour better than a mood ring

and more melodramatically than a rejected adolescent.

Deep Persian blues

freaked with celestial Chinese greens

that almost made him believe at the time

that a petunia must have been a peacock in another life.

Waste, litter, leaves, traffic lights

swaying in the wind

like a trainman with a lantern down the line

trying to slow things they have no effect upon down.

Stop. Go. Pause.

The magic is gone.

Nothing moves the way it should.

The train starts mourning from a long way off

like a dog that’s lost its master.

Space is laid out like a Nazdac runway

with omnidirectional perspective

but no one’s taxied up to the tower yet

to ask for permission to take off.

He looks up.

Jupiter.

Just past zenith, southwest

of the Alley Cats Bowling sign and gym.

He lives above and one apartment down

from the narrow tunnel into the courtyard

of the old coach house where the horse culture of Perth

used to stable their overexuberant buggies.

Past the gold and soot coloured mailboxes

that look like they’ve been in a plane crash

and were waiting to be reassembled

as soon as the mailman can find the flight recorder

in the right black box.

Through three doors

up one worn flight of stairs

through an unpainted veneer and cardboard door

down a long haul past a gas furnace and a coatrack

he returns to his private chaos

nebulous with insomnia

as the counter-intuitive nemesis

of overexhaustion and the last of the good bud.

Last toke of the night.

Last cigarette.

Last coffee.

Over and over and over again

like a mantra looking for oblivion.

Nada. Nada. Not enlightenment.

He thinks of an Irish bank teller he likes

because she scares and excites him

with the possibility of her beauty and darkness.

He looks at last year’s masterpiece

propped up in the silence above his desk

but one look at his eyes

and it’s said all it’s going to say to him tonight.

Which leaves the lamps for late night conversation

but they’re about as scintillating as the coma he’s in.

The air in the room

one long pregnant pause

before the crack of dawn or doom

or whichever comes first,

he watches his mind like landfill

for any sign of his corpse.

The darkened see-through coffin of his aquarium

worthy of Napoleon or Lenin lying in state

to see the lineaments of greatness stone cold dead

where his goldfish recently died

like the Bolshoi Ballet or a comet

with an urgent dispatch for the sun

who killed the messenger as soon as it arrived.

He would have buried him at sea

for the sailor he was

but all he had was a toilet at the time

and no flag to wrap him in but cellophane.

No twenty-one gun salute.

Just the salvo of a thin gas chimney pipe

warming up like shallow heavy metal.

The indignity at the end always hurts worse

than the broken promise of a false start

but such is life he tells himself

without really knowing what he’s agreeing to.

PATRICK WHITE

A MUSE WALKS IN THE DOOR

A MUSE WALKS IN THE DOOR

A muse walks in the door

as if we’ve met somewhere before.

Is there anything more tempting

than a woman with a vice

and a wound so deep

you’ve been falling for light years

into a black hole you call love

lonelier than the singularity

that hasn’t reached bottom yet

but hears there’s a whole new world

on the other side of her hourglass figure

if you ever do make it through

to the far shore

of her kind of abrupt Rinzai satori

gone, gone, altogether gone beyond.

She reminds me of the city lights of Port Angeles

seen from the southern tip of Vancouver Island

on a clear night by the sea

across the Straits of Georgia.

Fairy dust at the foot of an extinct volcano

starting to get active again

with every upward thrust

of two continental plates

along the San Andrea Fault

trying to leave a mark on the world

by shifting for themselves.

And it’s not always easy

to distinguish between

inspiration lust love and an earthquake

one from another

when the earth shakes under your feet

and the walls wobble like musical saws

in a house of cards

clear-cutting your old growth forests

with a complete disregard

for the senior sonority of the sequoias

or the sound of the wind

in the laurels of their poetry

when Apollo’s trying to get his hands on Daphne.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERYTHING I WANTED TO BE

EVERYTHING I WANTED TO BE

Everything I wanted to be.

Not me.

Just like you.

I remember getting up early

every Saturday morning in Victoria

and going out with my mother

and two sisters and younger brother

and sometimes my grandmother

to scour the acres and acres

of East Indian woodlots

drying the newly split

book-shaped slabs of wood

as if someone had just put out the fire

in the Library of Alexandria

and left this toppled tower

of bottom-feeding erudition

on the outskirts of town

for beer-bottles left over from the night before

and wild blackberry patches

we had to get to before the sun and the birds did.

People went there on a Friday night

to drink and fuck in these heavy swells

of reeking spruce and fir

with Prussian blue mussel shells

still clustered in bunches to the bark

like the sea’s answer to grapes.

We dumped the stale beer out

along with the used condoms and cigarette-butts

and if it weren’t for the fact

we were swimming in wood

we might have been mistaken for pearl divers

given how we came up for air

gasping with excitement

that we had found another one.

It was all just a big impromptu Easter egg hunt

put on by the local church of Satan

for those kids the Easter bunny had missed.

Two bits a dozen

or two cents a piece

stacked like spent artillery casings

in a two-wheeled wire-mesh grocery cart

that made the bottles clink

like a Glockenspiel in a hailstorm

everytime my mother moved it

to a more strategic location.

We didn’t come like gypsies

or crows or seagulls to the woodlots.

This was a full blown military occupation

and our survival in between welfare cheques

depended on it

like William Carlos Williams’ little red wheelbarrow

in the rain beside the white chickens.

We drank the black blood

out of the arachnid eye sacs of the berries

crushing them against our palettes with our tongues

just like John Keats

crushed that autumnal grape in his ode to joy

just before they went too mushy to pick

and took on a mouldy taste

that felt like spider fur in your mouth.

Powerful green breakers of berries

that could suck you down into their undertow

and hold you in their depths

like spiny sea urchins, sawfish, razor-wire

or giant octopi with thorny tentacles instead of suckers

you could stick like stain-glass sunflowers to a window

if you know how to lick them just right

to make their suction cups

in conjunction with your spit

stick longer than lipstick French kissing

a pricey glass of champagne.

Even then I was dreaming of the finer things in life.

Thoroughbred goblets one day

but for then those noisy beer-bottles

like the sweating horses of pussy-whipped Neptune.

And would you believe it

we were all together happy back then

laughing at what we had to do for a living.

We were salvagers of a shipwreck

that had been cut up for firewood

and these long-necked empties in our hands

as if we grabbed a flock of cormorants by the throat

useless to everyone except ourselves

after having delivered their message

like a lifeboat at the end of a James Bond movie

to those marooned here on a Friday night

weren’t beer-bottles but Greek amphorae.

Na. I don’t believe it either.

You make things up to adapt to the lack of them all

when you’re a kid

when you’re poor

when you dream just so

you won’t lose the habit of it

when you fall between the cracks

like a penny down a gutter

because you know too much

by the time you’re six

about what happens when you throw the full moon

like a coin down a wishing well

and how little difference there is

between the things that don’t happen

and the things that aren’t true

and the things that just go splash like Basho’s frog.

But happy, yes, in moments like that

collecting beer bottles in the East Indian woodlots

on the outskirts of town

as if we were shared the same joyous delirium

of improbably getting away with something like our lives

because were desperately ingenious

in the way we’d make walkways through the blackberries

by throwing down planks end to end

and topping our tin laundry buckets

and leaking silver collanders

that always reminded me of bleeding starmaps off

with the furthest, the best, the sweetest we saved till the last.

When you’ve only got the slimmest of half a chance to make it

the future’s always more innocent than the present

and the past might be out on parole any day now

for things you shouldn’t ask a kid to understand

even though you know he does.

Everyone I wanted to be. Not me.

Just like you.

When I wasn’t preoccupied

with beer bottles and blackberries

abandoned orchards of peaches plums apples

and the geraniums and marigolds

I’d steal from the neighbours gardens

for my mother who would invariably ask

as she was transplanting them

without expecting me to answer

where they came from.

Buckets of peanut butter

heavy as bells chafing our shins

as we tried to walk with them like awkward steeples

at the backdoor of the peanut butter factory,

running an extortion racket on telephone booths

by knowing how to tip the horseshoe of the receiver

upside down for loose change

that had run out of luck.

All the local churches

playing musical chairs with our souls

in a game of hamper hamper

who’s got the hamper this month

and who suffered their little children to come unto us,

potatoes too bruised for the potato factory,

a face cord of salmon from the fisherman

coming in with their catches to refuel

down by Johnson Street Bridge

where I’d collect pigeon eggs under the girders for friends.

When it wasn’t this

I was teaching myself algebra

from an old khaki green Salvation Army math book

on my grade six summer vacation

my mother had picked up for a dime

because after a fighter pilot, a cartoonist, a paleontologist,

a street-wise prodigy found dead in my bed in the morning

from an accidental suicide,

I wanted to be an astronomer.

Except for most of all my love affairs

I have suffered few wounds as deep

as when I used to cry in my sleep

for inconsolable hours every night

between the ages of seven and ten

because I’d been born too early

to step foot on another planet

where you didn’t have to walk the plank

to get at the beer-bottles and best blackberries

before the sun and the birds did.

Everything I wanted to be. Not me.

Just like you.

But hey, look at me now.

I’m a poet

and I’m more spaced out

than I could have ever been

in anyone’s air force

and even if I haven’t discovered

a habitable planet to put down roots in yet

I’ve been walking on stars for light years

by putting down planks like poems end to end

to gorge on the choicest blackberries

on a Saturday morning in the East Indian woodlots

as if I were happy again

even among all these luminaries

with better myths of origin than mine

being what I am.

Just like you.

Not me.

Everything I wanted to be.

In spades.

In cornucopias and windfalls.

Buckets full of blackberries.

A rickety grocery cart

clinking with two dozen beer-bottles

the spoils of a Roman triumph

as we rode our golden chariot through a slum

me, my brother and sisters,

sometimes my grandmother,

and Mum.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SILENCE HAS GROWN SO MAGNANIMOUS IN THE NIGHT

THE SILENCE HAS GROWN SO MAGNANIMOUS IN THE NIGHT

The silence has grown so magnanimous in the night

it encompasses all of space and time

in a palace of dark matter

with light beaming through

the cracks of the planets

that have been stacked into walls

like the skulls the Mongols heaped up

like the foundation stones of Samarkand,

Olmecs in Teotihuacan,

or on a gentler note, Golgotha.

Upon one skull you can build a church.

And an Orphic skull might look like

a dead moon to ordinary eyes

but when your inner vision waxes to full

you realize when it drops its jaw

as if it were gaping at something transfixing

to prophesy what comes next

as you asked it to

life is swarming all over it

like black ants over the globular clusters

of the white peonies abandoned by a farmhouse garden.

Two twenty a.m. and I’m sitting

on the tie of a high train trestle

trying not to get slivers in my ass

and black creosote all over

my last clean pair of jeans.

I’m dangling my feet in the abyss below me

like a kid gone fishing in a Norman Rockwell painting

and positioning my arms like the legs of a French easle

so I can tilt my head back like a telescope

on an alta-azimuth mount

and look at the explosive array of stars before me

without falling off my vertiginous perch

because my gerry-mandered tripod

couldn’t keep its bearings straight.

It’s a mistake to count on a crutch for a rung

on this endless extension ladder

on the back of a fire-engine

because it couldn’t reach

the windowsills of the stars

missing a dimension or two

to reach the woman in the moon

with her hands up against the glass

screaming for someone to come to her rescue

as the windows melt faster than they can weep.

Stars are to me

what cocaine is to a mirror

in a reflecting telescope with clock-drive.

I get a rush every time I rail them through my eyes,

shoot them under my tongue

or o.d. on them sitting on a train track

thinking how weird and surrealistic

my addiction to them has made me over the years

that I only stopped to piss by the side of the road

and risking bears

made my way through the leafless trees

to end up out here in the clear where I could see better

how much higher yet there was to aspire to

and how much further to fall.

Bellatrix, Rigel, Saiph, Betelgeuse,

Alnilam, Alnitak and Mintaka.

Orion at the end of deer-hunting season

extending its license to kill by a week

north of highway 7

as it crosses zenith.

I’m not playing Russian roulette with a train trestle

but I doubt I could dodge the bullet

were one to come my way

even though it wouldn’t make any sense

given that we still need each other for support

each in our own special way.

As it is I’m sitting in the middle of the Road of Ghosts

as the natives called the Milky Way

mesmerized by the doe-glare of the oncoming stars

that pass right through me

as if a head-on collision were a redundancy

their deer-whistles couldn’t avoid.

Three thousand five hundred western miles that way home.

Twenty-five miles outside of Perth near Bolingbroke

I wonder what my mother’s doing now

three hours behind me

in a time-zone with more of a future than mine

and if she ever

when she thinks of me

conceives of a bird on a wire

perilously suspended in space

like the last whole note

to drop out of a song

that’s getting ready to leave for the winter.

I raise myself up on my hands

and my legs straight out into space

on a balance beam at the Olympics

I swing like a loveseat on a country porch

to see if the daredevil boy in me

is still fit to wear my balls like the man

it’s sometimes laughable to think that I am.

I used to do the same for her

when I climbed to the topmost branches

of the abandoned orchards of the Saanich Peninsula

to throw the choicest apples down

she used to catch in her kerchief one by one.

Looking down as I waited

for her to catch the next one

I’d watch her gently arrange them like skulls

at the foot of a siege ladder

with her son on the highest rung of all

not listening to her warnings,

disappearing over the holy walls of Jerusalem

like a crusader that had taken it a step too far

and realized there was as far to fall

on the other side of the infidels

as there was on the side that God was on.

Now I keep my heroism to myself

like something I’m slightly ashamed of

like a movie star with a stand-in stunt man.

I take chances.

Great subjective risks

with dire physical consequences

to keep spiritual things material

by refusing to abstract my senses.

This isn’t a train trestle in Bolingbroke.

It’s the bridge of Chinvat

that Zoroaster said everyone

among the holy and the damned

would have to cross

raised up from the dead on the Day of Judgement

to see hell before it was decided

whether you were a son of the lie

or the son of a truth that got double-crossed.

But given my indifference to both

as if they were just spontaneous happenings

in a charged particle field reversing spin

as high as wide as far as deep as I can see

in all directions at once

out here alone by myself,

the exception that got left behind,

all I’m aware of are the stars

and the tops of the cedar trees

tiered like rustic pagodas

trying to fly when the wind

gets under their wings

like shaggy boughs

that never make it off the ground.

Nothing but stars.

Nothing but open sky and moonset.

Nothing but space and time and Jupiter

and the Hesperides in their apple orchards

wondering what Alcyone in the Pleiades

thinks she’s got over them

that’s worth so much more of my attention

I can almost forget where I am and let go

if I weren’t as unattainable to her

as she is to me.

Look at me Mum

no hands

at the top of a tree forty feet below me

like a pine cone

with all its eyelids open

that doesn’t care where it lands

among all these meteors

shaken out of the radiant of the Leonids

like the Cannonball Express

given how many light years it’s been

since you were last there to catch it

like a falling star

and put it in your pocket

and never let it fade away

though we both know

it’s a little too late

a train too far

and a night too deep for that.

PATRICK WHITE

AZAZEL SAYS

AZAZEL SAYS

Azazel says

if you don’t live it somebody else

is going to end up with your future.

Insert local habitations and names thereof here.

Perth, Ontario. Population six thousand.

From here to Kingston the pioneers did nothing

in the way of land naming but plagiarize Scotland.

But it isn’t less airy here and now

than it ever was anywhere else.

The streetlamps go on like repeating decimals.

Venus hot and bothered in the green tangerine dusk.

And even through the doe-glare of the highway headlights

and the light pollution of those who never look up,

Jupiter in the east above the Smokin’ Eagles Smoke Shop

on Lanark County 10 heading toward Franktown,

the lilac capital of Canada.

You want to know what the doe feels

in front of an oncoming car sometime

look up at the stars and try to make sense of it all.

But that was in Richardson, five miles outside of Perth.

So where are we now?

In deep space?

Or back on earth?

Everybody edgy until the first snow.

Off balance astraddle a snow line

one foot on a summer beach

and the other on an ice-floe.

Hail today and cold.

Ave November.

How now brown cow?

However thick you lay it on

you’ll still look the same in the spring

when the snow’s gone.

The loosestrife and the mustard ruined.

The deer herd culled.

The moose shot, cut up and bled

and wrapped in a brown paper cover

like the meatier parts of a dirty novel.

Brown fields still in a state of denial

with a dirgeful mist hovering over them

like the last few wraiths of chlorine gas

on a few acres along the Somme

that have been allowed to return to nature again

with some enormous deformities

of man woman animal child and land.

The wild herds of pampas grass

have neglected their manes again

and they look like paintbrushes with cowlicks.

There are some fields as neat and predictable

as a pop song two minutes long with a hook.

And then there are the improvised jazz jams

in the drainage ditches along the highway

where the cattails get it on

with whatever weed shows up

in violation of its parole

to take a load off Benny.

Blown out tires, hub caps, roadkill,

and the wild irises in tight indigo nightgowns

who sang their hearts out on heroin

the way Billie Holiday sang the blues on deadly nightshade.

Azazel says

abundance is the root of all desolation.

How fast things age is a measure

of the depths of their disappointment.

You want your cake. You want your cake.

You stuff your mouth.

You blow the candles out

and then the cake eats you.

Life lives to eat itself and be hungry.

Probably true.

But November’s killed its appetite.

Silos like silver bullets way in the distance.

Little monopoly farmhouses

with mythically inflated driveways.

A phalanx of black iron gates

with crests and spears

and two cheesey lions just like those

you’d find outside a bank

that was trying to look imperial.

They’re not farms anymore.

They’re estates

with a Roman legion for gates.

And meanwhile back in town,

the pioneer suburb of Ottawa,

in an upstairs apartment on a back porch

overlooking a deserted parking lot

a nineteen-fifties style burgundy couch

with a bas relief of paisley brocade

abandoned by some weekend hippies

is growing too damp and organic to sit on

and smells like a sweating horse with black mould

the longer it’s left out in the rain.

And there are field mice, not many, a few

like the Roma of Europe

who’ve found a niche in life

among the loose change, nuggets of bud

log jam of unsalvageable cigarettes

in its crevices and crannies,

a selection of old lighters

each with an individual story to tell

and the coiled cartoon springs and stuffing

of an era that liked to round things off

like the bumpers of their cars and couches and women

as if they knew even way back then

they were going to sit for awhile

and look long and hard and hopelessly west

for the sun to come up just once at dusk

in the land of the midnight sun

and prove them right about their point of view.

But the mice don’t really care about

who got the window-seat on the bus

or how much baggage they carried on with them

like the elephant to the south of them.

They’re snug right where they are

and they travel light

happily balanced between security and a fire-escape

like the arsonist in all of us in autumn

as the Canada geese high overhead honk their horns

like the paddy waggons of the Keystone Cops in passing

as they leave the set with probable cause

to bust another marijuana patch like a pot boiler.

Azazel says

forget about the mice

forget about the geese.

The die is cast.

And there’s no turning back now.

Stand on the Gore Street Bridge over the Rideau Canal

and watch how the fish follow the Tay river

in suspended animation

and how the last of the swallows

to inhabit its fieldstones

cross it again and again without hesitation

like the flash of sabres that never clash

gleefully building a nation

like a lot of little holes in the wall

the birds can come back to

with a moat of their own

to frustrate the feral cats

that live under the bridges of Gore street

like famished Fenians on the prowl.

Azazel says

the nations have been unpeopled

by their governments

and data isn’t history

though it took a thousand deaths

from malaria and alcohol-related-on-the-job accidents

to make it what it is today.

Some crushed by falling trees.

Some drowning drunk

trying to swim across the river

to acquisition another bottle of whiskey.

Scarlet fever and childbirth on the farm.

It’s hard to number the miscarriages and still births

these old grey sway-backed arks and barns

that look like the last of the mammoths in the distance

have seen around here.

The nightmare febrile locks of stranded hair

that snaked over the foreheads

of the young wet wives who died

into their second year

of trying to continue a blood line

all the way from Ottawa to Kingston

like the plagiarized names

of all these small towns

that sprang up like stone-mills and water wheels

all along her birth canal.

British half-pay officers in beaver skins

building dams alongside the beavers

as if this were Kandahar, Afghanistan

and tribal Scottish highland chieftains

who ran Renfrew like the Taliban.

People have a way of abstracting

what’s crucial about the stem cells of life

from the sweat and lechery

that went into producing them.

Walking boats like reluctant debutantes

that have been taken under the arm

up and down the stair wells

of a palace of water in high heels.

Spidery horse-drawn carriages on springs

that learned to sing

to the beat of corduroy roads

and keep a decent pleat in their prose.

Imported butlers holding out silver plate

to accept the salutary donations

of the calling cards who dropped in

to see if So and So were as thin

as the last letter she sent them.

People who took a bath in their own grave every day

and left a ring around the tub

like the ripple in the heartwood of a tree

on the growing edge of history.

Who considers the spit on the back of the stamp

that went off to war for king and country

just to have a return address to come back to

like a river you can’t step into twice

even if you were to build

one of the world’s longest canals

with post office boxes in it for the swallows?

Azazel says

it’s casually ironic

that one of the first things these people did

to work all this up

into a life and a home and a heritage of their own

was kill the Algonquin village next door

for having one of its own.

History is a screening myth

to cover up what someone did with the bones.

If they’re sacred, they’re sacred by default.

No one on the bridge disagrees

even when they see

weaving its way like a lifeline among the catfish

a long trail of blood

all the way back to the village.

Brutal to have one people vanguish another

and then turn on its own

out of sympathy

for what it’s just so irreparably damaged.

That’s why I need Azazel around.

I may be the lightning rod.

But he’s the ground.

PATRICK WHITE