ADOLESCENT BRIDAL SPIDERS WEBBING THE DOORWAY

ADOLESCENT BRIDAL SPIDERS WEBBING THE DOORWAY

Adolescent bridal spiders webbing the doorway

with laughter and tumescent sex,

waiting for the hilarious rain.

Waitresses with overly bleached hair

and melting chocolate roots. Young men in wife-beaters

orbiting their pheromones like shepherd moons.

The air is a Venus fly trap saturated

with the violet wavelengths of an unexpurgated murder.

Sheet lightning rooting in the nervous system

of teenagers dogpaddling in the heat without a lifeboat

between the iodine logo of the antiseptic bank

and the unpainted stairs with their garish fire-doors

that ascend into hell like most of the local ghettoes

dancing with their fans to cool off,

or drinking beer in the parking lots,

or passing spliffs to potted plants on the fire-escapes.

Exorbitant flesh sticky with sweat and deodorant,

And the heritage streetlamps haloed

in a frenzy of mesmerized insects

like comets falling into the epiphanous sun at midnight.

Mosquitoes pumping their blood thinners

like punctuation into a periodic sentence.

And I observe all this trying to extinguish myself

like a cigarette butt in the ashtray of a full moon

trying to make a meteoric impact on the unknown

to see if anyone else is home, but me, and these exiles outside.

Stars in the window, but my eyes are grimy with traffic.

The clarity’s smudged. The heat grows a cataract

over my third eye like a low-hanging homogenous cloud,

a curd of the moon, as I keep looping back on myself

like the fervour of a solar flare that can’t escape gravity.

There are sunspots on my radiance. My meditation’s not perfect.

There are the crumbs of stale dreams in the corners of its eyes.

My diamonds are evaporating in a blast furnace

and the picture music’s gagging my voice with paint rags.

But here and there, in little pools of cyanobacteria,

love bubbles up slowly like thin silver necklaces

forged in the fathomless depths of this primordial soup.

Intense heat. Unusual sprouts. As they say in Zen.

Dawn on the feathers of the dinosaurs

couldn’t help but make them sing as well

even when my starmud’s cracked like a prophetic skull

in the dry creekbed of a dust bowl

where the toads have been hibernating

for the last seven years, and the scorpions burnt to a crisp,

add a little love to the mix, and even a blackhole

will flower like a galaxy in the cool bliss

of listening to its cosmic background radiation sing

like an ancient nightbird to its ageless longings.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY'S WISDOM

WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY’S WISDOM

When the unsayable supplants yesterday’s wisdom

it makes it look obvious and trivial in retrospect

and you marvel at the spiritual gestures of goodwill

that swept you off your feet for light-years

as the arcana of a discipline you gave up trying to master,

because you could only see into the matter

as far as the light you were given to go by.

And you didn’t know then that when

you blew the candle out you held

pathetically up to the abyss that you did more,

by blowing it out, to illuminate the universe,

than you did when you fed it your heart

to keep it burning like a night light among the stars,

or a lighthouse paling in the full glare of the sun.

Off the path is the way of the path.

How can anyone be lost? Or found, for that matter?

Midways of gurus with their touring freak shows.

Sacred matchbooks of budding sulphur

throwing humans into the Bonfire of the Vanities,

chasing the bank-rolled Renaissance out of Florence.

Terminal literalism, infectious symbolitis

sweeping down the coast like hemorrhagic fever

from the merchant fleets of Genoa. The wild grape vines

of intuitive insight converted into the razor wire

of paranoid orthodoxies. The heretics bear witness

to the madness in the judgement of their abusers,

and scald the clouds with their blood for it.

The spiritual highways cluttered with exiles,

refugee saints, and scapegoats, where is there

a wilderness left where the tourists don’t go

to gawk at the hermits like wildlife? Back

to the birch groves and the cawing of the crows

like auctioneers that don’t have a thing to sell.

No one’s footprints to follow in. The way things

turn out, at best, a wolf path through the snow

gone by spring, or where you bent the waist high grass

by walking through it like the path of least resistance,

unmapped as the wind. What is it all, when

even the seven-tiered tower of the Scotch thistle

is a mental event, if not open, unknown and empty

in the sense of being indefinable, not missing,

as if anything were there in the first place

it was crucial not to lose? Spare your tears.

Life hasn’t got anything to repent or reform.

The mystery manifest as it is and that’s the whole of it.

What more of it is there to reveal, than the rocks

have already said? Real, not real, the flowers bloom nonetheless

and you’re free to make or feel or think or not

about them as you wish. Mourn the ruination

of the flowers in a passion play as old as the stars

or trust your own mind to mentor you in the ways

of not reifying it into a thing among things,

the source and matrix of your most cherished illusions,

the mirage of the dark mother who eats her own like time.

There is no pattern, path, paradigm, psychodynamic

or unified field theory that the mind won’t

accommodate itself to like a child’s drawing of the universe.

You can elaborate the roots of a tree like a fractal into

a morphology of knowledge forms

that sing in its boughs like sparrows

in the black walnuts of the morning

and then consult it like the grammar of a dream

for the blue print or starmap of the house you’re building

like a screening myth with a built-in library.

The magician gulled in the doorway of his own magic,

having lost the key to the spell he cast

when this desert of stars was merely

the vagrant threshold of a tent in the moon’s back yard.

The folly of sages, the wisdom of fools,

what’s the point of enlightening your own freedom

if you’re too afraid to accept it as the mystical mundanity

that’s under your nose this very moment?

You can hunt your own shadows down like heretics

fleeing the hounds of heaven, you can denounce

an eclipse for being a sunspot on your illumination

and polish the mirror for the rest of your life

and still not wash your face off with a paint rag

like a clown in a green room waxing tragic

to counteract the laughter at the expense of his own wounds.

Look into the eyes of the roadkill for yourself

as if no one else in the world can do your seeing for you

and you won’t see anything very shocking to be afraid of.

No spiritual snake-eyes. No hidden meaning

you have to get at the guts of like a turkey-vulture.

And if you feel compassion, and it’s natural you should,

it’s because there’s something communal about the random

you sense has been going on a lot longer

than the last few thought moments when you showed up

to be misunderstood by your own imagination.

You want some good spiritual advice to get you in the habit

of taking it yourself, whether things are sublimely rough

and death is dying into you, or life is trivializing

the palatial playhouse it was born into? When occasion arises,

and when does it not, learn to call your own bluff

and sit down on the ground, and have a good laugh.

PATRICK WHITE

KISSES INSTEAD OF SCARS IF YOU CAN MANAGE IT

KISSES INSTEAD OF SCARS IF YOU CAN MANAGE IT

Kisses instead of scars if you can manage it.

Love, not a science. Still an art. Though a dying one.

The discipline of staying a constant beginner.

As if the morning glory had never felt the light before.

You want to love or be loved? Make up your heart.

But you want to sword dance with queen cobras in heat

like a lapwing in a snake pit, two egg-layers

at opposite ends of the same extreme, you better not

step on anyone’s toes, and if you do, hope

the wing you favoured with a false wound

like a collapsed bridge you lay down like a joker

to trump your Tarot pack, is as long as the other

royal flush you neglected to play like a winning hand.

Human, you might be the measure of all things,

but believe me when I tell you, love’s got a bigger wingspan

than Cygnus and Aquila in the Summer Triangle have light-years

to get a fix on the wing tips of their feathers by parallax.

Love with class if you want to make something elegant

of your absurdity, diamonds of your dirt, if you want to

water flowers with your tears without salting the seed bed.

If you want to steal a little fire from the mystery

to enlighten your nightmare, if you want to be the star

that everyone points to in your lover’s eye,

don’t enter it like a dirty needle of light washed up on a beach,

you keep overdosing on like a starmap with a bad addiction.

Love is a retroactive prediction from the past come true at last.

Even after dismemberment, love is Orphic, a prophetic skull

bobbing like an apple all the way to Mytilene from Thrace,

that can still sing the dead back up out of hell

until they realize the light of love’s too strong

for the eyes of gibbering shades and turn around

as if they’d come too far down the wrong road.

As a working stiff, love is kind, generous, trustworthy, loyal,

like the smell of heartwood after a carpenter has built

his own sturdy cross. Not acrid oak, but terebinth.

As a thaumaturge, love works miracles with silver herbs

cool as moonlight laying its feathers on the sacred pools

you return to like a battered salmon or a sword in tribute

to give back in gratitude what was given to you.

O, yes, you can be a nice guy or an agreeable woman

for a moment, and bask in the whole wheat sunshine

of a promising harvest, but love is the blue,

the second full moon in October and it looks down

on what’s been threshed to see what you’ve left for the birds

and if you ever get so drunk in your delirium

you went dancing with the scarecrows as if you

were all martyred by the same cause like a prelude

of watchdogs to the white nights of the living dead.

Love’s a celebrant high on the bliss of poppy wine

but it doesn’t turn the dancing floors of the starfields

into a bride catalogue for impoverished wallflowers.

Love’s got the eyes of a snake, the voice of a bird

and the wings of a vampiric bat in an unpredictable eclipse.

And when love mystically sublimates its appetites

like black ice into more beatific ionospheres of solar flaring,

the poetry goes aurorally absurd, but nobody cares

because everybody’s more awed by the picture-music

of the rippling veils than they are by the face behind them.

You make love safe. You take the danger out of it,

you defang the lightning storm, you brainwash

the theta waves of the turbulent night sea

where the soul journeys alone, into saying aum

every time there’s a breathless squall of stars in the southwest,

though you might think in your lustreless way

you’re throwing sacred holy oil on troubled waters

you’re just another oil slick running a nunnery of pearls.

You want your honey without a stinger. You want

your rose without a thorn. A one-eyed oxymoron.

I’ve made it a counter-intuitive point of survival

most of my occult romantic afterlife

to never fall in love with a woman until I’m absolutely certain

it’s well within her power to kill me outright

without a word of warning. But she abstains

and in that moment of hesitation you can live

three full lifespans on the cutting edge of a black hole

without a fear of lights or vertiginous heights.

You can ride the helical stairwells of your mutual d.n.a.

like the parallel bannisters of two hawks wheeling

synchronously on the twisted ladder

of their thermophilic passions for the highs and lows of love.

When did Icarus ever fly too close to the sun

with a parachute or a safety net? What fool

shot out of a cannon like a fly into a spider web

doesn’t expect to get entangled in the details

of hedging his bets instead of taking the fall on his chin.

If you fall in love, and you’re not a clown,

or someone who bumbled over the cliff by accident,

be prepared to fall deeper than any place

your death has ever descended into before, and darker,

and more intense than the petty sentiments

of people dropping stones in wishing wells

to fathom the abyss by staring into the eyes of a telescope.

PATRICK WHITE

DOUBLE FULL MOONS IN THE THERMAL PANES ACROSS THE STREET

DOUBLE FULL MOONS IN THE THERMAL PANES ACROSS THE STREET

Double full moons in the thermal panes across the street,

elaborate fractals of disproportionate replicates

in a seasick multiverse warped by the aging ripples of the glass.

I see Li Po drowning in all of them trying to embrace

the euphemistic screening myth of his suicide. I don’t think

a lotus bloomed where he died, but Jesus has a star

where he was born, so let’s put one there anyway

for a man who sang and drank and chanced his path

through life because no one offered him a job as a bureaucrat.

I love the double entendres of the unadorned.

How the waterlilies land like migrating swans

in the wetlands of the windows, and don’t expect to drown

like Narcissus in the mirrors of their own reflections.

But then I’m not in the habit of looking at things

like the emergency mentor of telescopes that suffer

nervous breakdowns looking for their third eye among the stars

as if it were interred in neuronic masses of black matter

and you could uproot it like a grail quest for ginseng

in the deep woods of Lanark County if you know where to look.

The night hot and humid and totally unmotivated,

all the windows open, and a big fan sword dancing above my head

waiting for the thorax of the rest of the helicopter to show up,

all revved up like a propeller without a flight path to anywhere,

I’m Zen-duelling in the acephalic shadows

of my hydra-headed anti-selves

for the lack of better company

until the muse of my solitude shows up

like a knock on the door of my coffin without

expecting a cogently analogous answer.

I write her long loveletters of cedar-scented smoke

I conjure from the ancestral inkwells

of my penumbral black holes to express

the excruciating loneliness of my singularity in eclipse.

In the intense heat of frog-rutting desire

black orchids bloom in the all-consuming fire

of an heretical apostate trying to burn

his God-particles into the wavelengths

of the photonic discharge of the rainbow bodies

of the highest Himalayan rinpoches as if

the sherpas of the Book of the Dead

were way over their heads like clouds

in the mountains of the moon without an atmosphere.

Easy in public to master the mot juste of a scalpel

you can use to nip and tuck the flabby psyches

of the less beautiful among your friends, but alone,

it’s different to divest a ventriloquist of your life-mask

and express yourself in a secret grammar as twisted

as the sensibilities of the evil jesters of the times are

in the fun-filled halls of the judicious mirrors

that can only recognize you by the accent of your tears.

To bring a gravitational eye to your unworthy affairs

and bend space into conformity with the magic rituals

of a black mass in an asylum of acquiescent pharmaceuticals.

Not to talk to yourself as if you were enamelling buttercups

with imaginative projections, or immolating blue hydrogen

like wild irises breaking out like insurgent firestorms

along the mindstream of your vagrant waywardness

as if off the path were the way of the path as far as you can go

without turning into the template of a preconceivable destination.

But to see how the full moon shines in a thousand lakes,

a thousand thermal-paned windows, a thousand and one eyes

and a mystical number of poets drowning like a multiverse

in every one of them, or conversely, the moon,

as must happen in the infinite waterclocks of time,

sinking like a pearl of nacreous wisdom

through myriad incarnations of Li Po letting go

like blossoms and poems scattering before the fruit

of their inexhaustible enterprise ripening into a windfall of eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

DRUNK ON NETTLE WINE

DRUNK ON NETTLE WINE

Drunk on nettle wine, alone, scalded by stars

that harass my sense of wonder like blackflies

with the atomic futilities of transformation,

the broken windows of their radiance,

an ice-storm of splintered glass

that catches me in a downpour of histrionic chandeliers,

the legends of enlightenment, a farce of words,

and the only thing the night has said for hours

that makes any sense in my patrician isolation,

an ambulance, a cat in heat, and the click of a loaded zippo,

I sit in a ghetto of upwardly mobile elements,

and confess to myself there’s little left of my life

that shines in a way that isn’t buffed
with time and separation and sorrow.
And I want to set fire

to the heavy theater curtains of my bloodstream

that are always sweeping closed
like capes and lilies and weather fronts

on the tragic premiers of my inexorable flaws,

and the decrescent scars of my cosmic screenings,

and the fools that went mad to unman their malignancy;

I’ve broken my teeth on the iron bones

I’ve been thrown to gnaw at under the periodic table

as if I were the dog of a molecule;

and I’m sick of filling in for the missing letters of neon motels

as if I were the inert footnote of a nightshift gas;

or falling through the gaps into this half-life

between calcium and carbon. I want a diamond skull

with eyes as blue as uranium skies

and a heart of gold free of the ore of its afterbirth,

and chlorine blood that flows as green as spring

in the lady at the gate, no lead in my shadow,

and a silver smile, and a plutonium voice

with an intercontinental delivery system.

I want off the flat bell curves of my railroad pulse,

and out of the fish-net Saharas of thought

that will always, only, ever be the first draft of an ocean,

amateur gills of sand. I want to give

these opening night roses back

to the baglady who stole them, 

and the moth-pocked wardrobe

of defused relationships that left the stage

with the grace and the charm of a blasting cap,

and no more tungsten honey from the hive of the streetlamp,

and no more silicon brain implants

to upgrade the cleavage of a sagging I.Q.

I want to be a river the rain can look up to,

I want to be a tree so certain of itself

even its shadow has fingerprints

that reveal its personal history, I want to be

someone who doesn’t know what it means

to not want to be

the white lament in the womb of a pregnant pause.

PATRICK WHITE

THE FLOWERS OF THE STREET PEOPLE

THE FLOWERS OF THE STREET PEOPLE

White trash with their faces punched in like catcher’s mitts

mooning the flowers of the street people as they drive by

like a float in a pageant of ignorance having a good time

at everyone else’s expense. Pygmy heroes of their own irrelevance.

Annie, the bag-lady, puts the avalanche of her head down

and spits like salt as if she just survived Sodom and Gomorrah

as she passes by, sullen and resigned to the blackflies

that have swarmed her like the shadows of commas for years.

You just have to take one look at her face to know

she’s the dried rose of a gnostic gospel that went flakey

long before women were forbidden from invigilating

their own spirits. Given the protocols of the bleakness,

even the city can serve as a shrine of sorts. Man bulls

in lunar labyrinths, and the Princess of Spiders,

unweaving her thread in a moment of desire

waiting to have her webs elevated among the stars

in cosmic reprisal for the betrayal of her abandonment to love.

And there’s Peter, the architect turned shipwreck,

on a chain gang in a quarry, he’s cracked so many rocks

to extract the gold rush out of his sixty dollars worth of meteorites

and flush it through his veins like a motherlode

back into the ore of his panspermic flesh. He begs

money on the corner on behalf of his dealer

all day long, a begging bowl that still has to pay

for his drugs in paradise. One day, if he keeps complaining,

because the last thing to go when you’re mad,

is your understanding of money, the dealer’s

going to smile like a snake and pat him on the back

and say, yes, Peter, you’re right, you should be in on the take,

and give him a rock the size of Gibraltar

that will see his mummy being wheeled into

the sarcophagus of an ambulance by the morning

of the next replicated day. Which is maybe what he wants.

And who killed the hysterical rose lady who

for twenty years flogged a little beauty in the bars

to anyone who wanted to make a romantic move

on the flippant female sitting next to them

spending her disability cheque trying to forget

all the shabby dawns that have come on to her like boyfriends

and how she liked to throw them off the bridge to Hull

like the artworks of terrified ex-cons trying to make a getaway.

This actually happened to a friend of mine

in the squalid back room of a degenerate relationship

after he’d been raped repeatedly by a Christian reformatory.

But he can paint in any corner of six possible restaurants

in the Ottawa Market as if he had the eyes of a peacock

in the full bloom of a mating ritual with the waitresses.

And Kathy’s in the doorway again at the bottom of the fire escape

trying to flog the ruined waterlily of her youthful face

as if this were the red light district of Amsterdam

though it’s nothing as lavish as that, to the first john

who wants to use her body like a telephone booth.

I give her money for nothing when I have it and tell her

to spend it on whatever she wants,

so there’s no guilt in the gift to add to her sorrows

and she thinks I’m a funny, wise man,

and though I’m happy I can make her laugh about something

it only enhances my tragic sense of compassion

to feel how brutal the truth can be when I don’t say a word

to dissuade her from believing I’m wise, and she’s still pretty.

And those three skull fractures there

are trying to put a price tag on my Boulet cowboy boots

to denude an old man of his footware in a side alley

after the restaurants have closed down their kitchens,

but there’s still more leather in my heart than mushroom

and they might end up wishing they hadn’t dropped out

of anger management, after they taste the explosive rage

of my munitions factory in a supernova of fireflies

waking the dragons sleeping in an abandoned coal mine

trying to forge their eyes into diamonds, and their claws

into a titanium alloy of crescent moons folded like sabres

they can wield like a blacksmith hammers an anvil

as an objective correlative of all that’s wrong in the world.

Reductio ad absurdum. The philosophical savagery

of a furious muse biting at her wounds like razorwire

in an internment camp for racial profiles, Queen Bee

shows the prostitots and street pups how she uses her needles

to crochet her body like a tea cosy for a Saturnian moon

speedballing heroin and crack with a touch of acetone,

kerosene, and veinous hydrochloride for a purple sunset.

Seminars in vicecraft at the left-handed nightschool

where she teaches starmaps to a class full of armpits

who want to know where to hit up next. Too cool

to be groovy, too chill not to be an ice age,

the temperature plunges like a syringe in permafrost.

Most living through the human mess that’s left

of the mythically inflated lives they used to live

with ineffectual clarity about what’s given them up for dead.

Sleeping with schizophrenic terrorists at the Good Shepherd

who see murder as a form of assisted suicide

and waking up in the morning to a knife-fight

between a mattress and a man who’s been

sleeping with it all night like a woman

he gave everything up for to expiate the horror

of living his eternally recurrent worst nightmare out

like a leper colony of the inchoate body parts of Barbie Dolls.

Had a desperately unloved Barbadian chartered accountant friend once

who had his throat cut in the morning

by two recently released ex-cons in a rooming house

for cooking his fish too loud while they were sleeping.

And that on the heels of landing his first job interview

in the last five futile months, hoping he could

lure his wife and kids back to any standard of living

that didn’t distemper the contagion of his exile.

And the drunks are connoisseurs of shoe-polish

and cheap colognes, shaking like aspens on a street corner

hoping not to foul themselves again in a squad car

before they can regurgitate themselves in the drunk tank.

And all the runaways have run out of faces to flee to

except for the motherly ladybugs who take them

under their spotted wings, and pander them to friends

like cultivated perverts in distinguished places

that know all the G-spots of the ingenuous government

they’ve been molesting on the sly for years.

And it’s fruitless to condemn, judge, blame

or punitively litigate the collateral damage of life

because you’re too delicately squeamish to watch

how the cow is killed, bawling, that you’re about

to sit down and eat with your well-kempt family

and your weedless ethics, o so neat, like a close-cropped lawn.

And if it’s rough and crude. Armageddon isn’t a Sunday school.

And survival’s a boxer that gives and takes dirty shots.

And the only moral imperative life lives by is: Live.

And it’s been a while since I’ve seen anybody

walking in someone else’s moccasins to empathize

why the grace of God went with this one like a greased mirror

that that one had to hitch hike on a turn pike.

And one other thing. I’ve seen shipwrecks

wedged so long on the bottom into their starmud,

the moon among the corals has covered

their skeletons with flesh as if there were terracotta armies

for the most defenceless of us too, and unlike

the pigeons on the statues of the prime ministers

four blocks away, so stoically posed in their noble solitude

attached like figureheads to the foremast of a flag pole,

life thrives vividly all around them like a painter

with a Jamaican sense of colour. And there are luminosities

so brief and brilliant you’d think you were watching

fireflies drop acid with the stars, acts of surrealistic living

where people who have nothing but their mere presence left

cherish giving even that up as well as if compassion

among the desperate, were the last sign of self-respect

that such cornucopias of life can be engendered by shipwrecks.

PATRICK WHITE

A CANADIAN POET SINCE YOU ASKED

A CANADIAN POET SINCE YOU ASKED

A Canadian poet since you asked.

I’m madder than the landscape.

Glaciers have scarred me

retreating north like my father.

My heart has been shaped by neolithic chisels

into a dolmen of Michelangelo’s David

with a silver bullet and a rock in his hand

and the determination of a statue

who refuses to be intimidated by a scarecrow.

The end of an ice age.

No leftovers.

The platter scraped clean as the Canadian Shield.

Savage runes carved in rock by rock.

Older than the Rosetta Stone

my silence is indecipherable.

I mean marrow.

I mean broken bones.

I mean blood on the snow.

The moon comes like a nurse to the wounded pines

and applies a cool poultice of light to their limbs

in a season of storms

when the lake raves

and the fish dive deeper into themselves

and the bears huddle up under their layers of fat

in caves they’ve turned into dream wombs

and I burn underground like the root-fire

of a radical evangelist

among survivalist cedars

gathering under tents of snow

to be born again in the blood of the Caribou.

There are more heretics in the wilderness

than there are saints.

Whatever it takes to keep warm.

There are nights when my spirit is so cold

it congeals on my eyes

like breath on a windowpane

and I’d say anything

without amending an iota of it

just to be burnt at the stake

and thaw the chandeliers of frozen tears

that hang over me like the sword of Damocles

or the brittle radiance of the Pleiades

where they pick glass apples from sapphire trees

or the crystal castles of Arianrhod in Corona Borealis

where everything turns like a Sufi top

but no one ever gets vertigo

and the Celts pay back money they owe the dead

after they die

if you can imagine that.

I make a significant Doppler Shift in my lifelines

and heaven sees red.

I am a Canadian poet

and my wingspan

is the sky over Saskatchewan.

I’m the firemaster of the staghorn sumac

when it rises like a phoenix in the fall

and then I’m a bird in the chimney

like a word stuck in my throat

I can’t recall

but it had something to do

with a wishbone and a harp.

I’m not the nice guy everyone purports me to be.

I’ve got the manners of a mountain

and the emotional life of the sea

and if I seem happy to meet people

it’s only because

it sometimes gets as lonely here

in the vastness of this snowblind no man’s land

as an icebreaker

shattering imageless mirrors

like cataracts in Frobisher Bay.

I’m a warm house

that opens its door to strangers on a cold night.

I bond like fire and shadows to anyone

against the impersonal inclemency of the weather.

That said

no man is Baffin Island

but there are foreign submarines

breeding like pods of killer whales all around me.

Explorers have been planting flags here for years

like artificial flowers in real gardens

but they keep getting lost in the holocaust of maples

gliding through no man’s land

behind a barrage of pine-cone artillery shells

to overrun the hill

like October assaultingVimy Ridge.

What the earth teaches us here

like a female warrior shaman

is the hard love of an exacting mother

that no one owns

and can’t be possessed by another

because she’s got thresholds like timberlines

even a wolf can’t cross

and a memory like the Arctic

if she’s taken for granted

or real estate.

I am a Canadian poet.

White gold

from English ore

and uranium from the French.

The raven trickster of native lore.

The sacred clown.

The dangerous taboo

that lives too deep in the woods

for anyone to break.

I am a Canadian poet.

I marry knives like superstitions

that are meant to protect me from myself

but the moon keeps baiting my love life

with sexual acts

to trap and trade me in

like the skin of a mink

for a double-bladed ax.

I am a Canadian poet

with multiple identities.

A multilingual polyphrenic patriot.

A chameleon with a passport that’s turning green.

because it’s spring here

and the lilaceous asphodels are up

but the seasons change like manic mood rings

and by the fall I’ll be burning my i.d.

in a protest rally of disaffected leaves

just to balance things

between Cain and Able

heaven and earth

murder and sacrifice

in a fair-minded farm boy kind of way

where everyone gets their ten minute say before God

and then sits down like the House of Commons

to break meat and wheat

salt and bread

loaves and fishs

or barbecued burgers and hotdogs with the crowds.

I am a Canadian poet.

I was cooked like a kid in its mother’s milk.

I grew up on the scraps they threw under the table.

I’ve learned to sing

like a street corner guitar case

that belts it out

like an open coffin at the Last Supper

where all they ever eat is flesh and blood

and I’m a desert on a diet

that’s not into moral food.

If religion wanted to do my generation any good

it should go confess its accusation

to a world it’s misunderstood

like a child it won’t admit

is the issue of its own miscegenation.

I am a Canadian poet

from a big country with with an aquiline overview

of human nature red in tooth and claw

and like you

I am a citizen of the same abomination.

I arm myself to go to peace.

I talk myself to death

instead of committing suicide.

When nobody wants to know you

what have you got to hide?

There’s no risk in being open.

And yesterday always tells me the truth

about why it lied to my youth

about why the windows were weeping for the future

like a skull with glacial lakes for eyes

and a place on the totem

they keep for the dead

where I just can’t seem to get ahead

of my own prophecies.

Here’s one.

Stick a fork in it.

I’m as done as a barbecue in hell

and that doesn’t mean I just don’t feel well

it means I can feel the flesh slipping from my bones

like snow off a roof in a spring warm-up

and all I’ve got to live on

is recalled food for thought.

I’m grateful for everything

but sometimes it’s hard to know

what to be grateful for

when everything tastes like a food bank

or Canadian culture

with the government for a muse.

For nearly fifty years

I’ve burned like a furnace

with the mouth of a fountain

firewalking across the waterstars.

There’s no axle on the wheel of birth and death

but for years I’ve been spinning it in the mud

thinking it might go somewhere

if I drive hard enough

but all I’ve done

is carded and spun whole cloth like Ghandi

from cottonmouths and fer de lance

meant to regulate the baby boom in slaves

like a cottage industry.

Now the skin I wore

like Yeats’ coat of old mythologies

in the fools’ eyes

to cover my enterprising nakedness

fits like the shroud of Turin

in a snake pit of sewing machines

that keep testing my bloodstream for plutonium.

It’s hard to learn to walk on water

when it’s high tide without any waves

and you’re always falling through the ice

too far from shore to risk a rescue.

When I’m cold enough to take my own advice.

I am a Canadian poet.

Second to none.

Because more than any nation could encompass

I’m first and foremost human.

And though it’s my brain

it’s not my mind

anymore than the wind is

and what it thinks

is not my personal property

to put my name on

and say I own this.

Sooner say you own the leaves in fall

you can at least take a rake to

and gather up and dispose of

like junkmail that came to the wrong address

than say this thought is mine

and that thought is yours.

You make a fist

of an open hand.

You begin to live behind closed doors

to keep yours in

and theirs out.

You concoct wars

that get out of hand

to change their children’s minds.

Wasn’t King Canute

and Britain when she put to sea

enough to convince anybody

that if anyone did rule the waves

nobody told the waves?

It’s the same with your mind.

How are your wavelengths

any different than those of the sea?

It’s like a star saying I own that light.

And I’m the one who decides whom it falls upon.

I am a Canadian poet.

The light is free

as it always has been

to create anything it wants to.

And though they’re my eyes

who can say the seeing

belongs to them alone?

You get the pointless point

of cowboy Zen?

I’m not a fountain pen

with blue blood for ink.

I say what I think without a blotter

to wipe my mouth clean of what I’ve said

like snow melting on the red oak in the woodshed

because it can’t take the heat

and wants to get out of the fridge.

I am a Canadian poet.

Wilderness flowers.

Fireweed after every conflagration

and columbine in the ashes

that didn’t know what else to grow.

And I suppose I should say something corny

about wheat and beavers and maple leaves and Mounties

and all that

but you already know and besides

at the bottom of all these totem poles

and reformed trees

that went to A.A. for drinking too much

I’m a lot more complicated than that.

I’m more dangerous

than any hardware store

you’ve ever met before.

And one thing about being born into a country

with enormous natural resources

like a mouse in a well-stocked pantry

you can afford to be seen

being kind and considerate to the poor

or as I do

scream murder

when I hear them being killed on the news.

Orpheus picks up his guitar in the corner

and begins to sing the blues.

See what I mean?

It’s obscene to be so decent about suffering

you raise both hands to stop it.

Every quarter given that was asked.

No surrender.

In this country that makes me an iconoclast.

Stand fast in the name

of any deception you disown

and you’re an outlaw

bad to the bone.

In literature class

they teach you to kiss ass anapestically

at wine and cheese soirees

making small talk awkwardly

across language barriers

with cultural attaches

after the reading

after the hour you spent

listening to cement

lament some lost cornerstone

that brought the house down

like the government

when she just couldn’t shovel

or churn it out anymore

and pretend it was butter

and good luck woman

made for the door.

He wants to call her a whore.

But he’s too nice for that.

So he talks about her poetry

as if it were as flat-chested

as she believed she was

playing to her worst fear

like paint ball

in suggestive overtones of camouflage.

A whole hour

waiting for one good line

that isn’t about making jam

or bleeding maples for their syrup

and how to flip a pancake like a lyric

over an open fire on the shore of Canoe Lake

where Tom Tomson drowned

standing up in his birchbark

to take a piss

or being hit on the head with a poker

out of jealousy

and somebody swapped his body with an Inuit

so its hard to intuit whose ghost was left

to give the creative seance of poets on tour

a sponsor to write about.

I write from the inside out

not the outside in.

I put the pauper before the prince

because I don’t like dressing up for royalty

and my girlfriend couldn’t afford a hat to meet the queen.

She was a hell of a human being

but she had rude hair

that wasn’t familiar with protocol.

She could paint like Frieda Rivera

or Georgia O’Keefe

but she was raised on welfare in Westmount

and didn’t think she needed a hat

to go anywhere

except when it rained

and even then she didn’t mind getting wet.

Things are so bittersweet here

you’d think everyone kept killer bees

and a hive was as good as a muse

to poets as dormant as smoke.

They all burn cedar boughs in a bucket

they swing like pioneer incense

to chase the bats out of the attic

across the road to their neighbour’s house

who answers them in kind with odes.

But I’m not a turtle crossing.

I am a Canadian poet

with low enough self-esteem

like the sea at the foot of the mountains

to compel me to abuse myself

by pursuing an earthly excellence

that’s always a threshold beyond

my material means to achieve

but works wonders for the spirit

you wouldn’t believe.

I can conceive gold easy enough

when I write like the Yukon

but I live like ore

at the bottom of an abandoned mine

that was staked out by alchemists years ago

like base metal trying to strike it rich

without having to be philosophical about it.

I am a Canadian poet.

That’s not a fact.

That’s an interpretation.

And I’m turning it

like a jewel in the light

to see if that means

I’m the right man for the wrong nation.

Nature or nurture.

Dynamic equilibrium

or the membranal equivalence of hyperspace

blowing bubbles that pop like worlds?

The same eye by which I see my country

is the same eye by which it sees me?

I can live with the ambivalence if need be

but what I can’t stand

is the artificiality of the collective unconscious

when it starts adding flags and logos to its archetypes.

Jung would weep himself to sleep

every night like a recurring nightmare for years

or turn into an advertising executive

just to see how polluted things can get

when you leave the farm to an idiot.

You end up threshing waterlilies

and the engineers can’t help

competing with beavers

to see who can build the most dams.

I am a Canadian poet.

I think like Montreal

but I feel just like Toronto

with Vancouver for a spiritual life

and Ottawa for a conscience.

But I’m most at home in the backwoods

with flowering weeds and islands of trees

the farmers circumnavigate with ploughs

with little things that go on in the grass

as if everything that went on in the rest of the universe

were of absolutely no concern to them.

One-eyed Zen.

Ants on the chicory.

The fox is in its den.

I can see more space in a grain of sand

than a dragonfly’s got places

to plant pot on crown land.

And I like the way time stops

when nobody’s watching

and there’s something ageless about aging

I hadn’t noticed before

that makes me feel I’ve been here forever

and none of my questions

about what human beings are doing

walking around on the earth

really mattered anymore

now that I’ve found a place

for my homelessness

in Canadian folklore.

I used to feel trivial

surrounded by so much that was majestic.

Sunsets out over the Pacific

that put poppies to shame

and the savage pyramids of the pharaohnic Rockies

too young to have an afterlife

worth the time and effort that has to go into it.

And besides

who needs hieroglyphs

when you’ve got the Burgess Shale?

I used to feel small

scurrying around in the shadows

of the tall imperium next door

under the feet of a brontosaur

waiting for a meteor

like my only hope

to get this dinosaur off my back.

I don’t have the genes to dominate a species

and evolution when you get right down to it

isn’t much of an achievement

when all it amounts to

is trying to make up for what you lack.

In art that means

there’s lots of grants for ingenuity

but none for genius.

The first painting goes up on the fridge.

The second jumps from a bridge

just to show them

how creative it is.

But that was years ago

when the only things I didn’t doubt

were trees.

I learned to weather things

like a whistling cherub in the corner of a map

that tells you which way the wind is blowing

by the gps of its cheeks.

I tasted the weather for myself

and found out all that rant

they taught me in highschool

about the pathetic fallacy not being true

was just science’s way

of looking at snow like a labcoat.

I am a Canadian poet.

It really does rain when I do.

PATRICK WHITE