YOU WERE A HOOKER BY SIXTEEN
You were a hooker by sixteen.
Your mother, your madame
The navy at N.F.B. Esquimalt, your
john.
In the triplex, next door, upstairs
on a Friday night, all the windows
broken from the inside by whiskey
bottles.
My friend, since you were seven,
how we struggled to keep our innocence
out of the world’s greasy hands.
Oil slick on the rose.
White peonies of blood-stained Kleenex
in the toilet bowl. Eclipse of the
flowers
in a city of gardens. Even when the
stars
were out, the darkness lurked, the
doorways
housed strangers like trap door
spiders.
Joy held a grudge against our wariness.
The windows didn’t trust us, and the
street
was a firewalk of ordeals to test us
for things we really didn’t
comprehend
but sensed, like broken glass, were
crucial.
Painful to remember even now,
grey, grey, grey, the middle-aged
children
trying to inch their way through the
concrete
like dandelions or blades of grass,
or when it was wet, wrote their names
in it,
each the founding member of a different
slab,
gravestones with graffiti epitaphs
laid like bets against a future
that had been conditioned
by violence, poverty, disappointment.
The mythic inflation of human extremes
venting fumaroles of pent up emotions
entrenched like killer bees in their
hearts
swarming the children in the agony of
their perversity
as if they were always trying to get
even with God
for something that drove them mad
with distemper and spiritual rabies.
Desecration always the answer.
Smashing beautiful things, debunking
the rare gestures of human divinity
that reminded them of who they weren’t,
fouling the waters of the children
with the effluvium of their own
degeneracy.
I can see the chestnuts of your big
brown eyes,
your helical blonde hair, your mulatto
lips
and the pearl of your nacreous smile
when we walked through the wild broom
fields
at the edge of town, and you forgot
how much your life hurt. Your mother.
Your body. Your corrosive acquiescence.
I should have made love to you
when you asked me why I hadn’t
and all I could say, because it was
true,
I wanted to be different for you.
I wanted to show you what water
couldn’t manage,
if you filled a bathtub up with tears,
you could always wash off in the stars.
You could burn off with light.
You could polish gold in the fire.
You could get out of the net
like the Circlet of Western Fish in
Pisces,
out of the fetid uncleaned fish tank,
and see for yourself how vast the ocean
is.
I didn’t know of a better way to be
with you
especially when you showed up on
Saturday morning
with wounds you’d keep to yourself
the rest of your life, and I wouldn’t
ask,
it could have been anyone of a dozen
men,
who bruised the beautiful blue eyelids
of the rose,
and how, phosphorus and dry ice in my
heart,
I wanted to give them a sex change
and turn them out like working girls on
car seats
in the badlands of the Hindu woodlots
that reeked like seaweed on the moon.
Murder too good for the likes of them
in the ferocity of what was left of my
boyish purity
I wanted to introduce them to the kind
of agony
that feeds on itself, a root-fire, an
inflammation
that can’t be contained by remorse or
forgiveness.
Thorns on the roses they use to wipe
their asses.
How many gates ago was that, how many
forbidden thresholds crossed, how many
long sidewalks you walked down alone
like a gazelle in the rain
with your stilettoes in your hand
thinking about nightschool
to become a nurse’s aide. Gone now,
noxious vapours from a street vent.
Heard you dumped a trick in Montreal
as soon as you got off the plane.
I went on to university which was
a different kind of whoredom without
the fun
and then deepened my alienation as a
poet
by refusing to forget about you
when I entered the witness protection
programme
and disguised myself in my solitude
to keep the nightmares from seeping
back in
like radon gas summoned to a seance in
the basement
where all the bodies were buried
that had made their bones at our
expense.
Still doesn’t make sense to me after
all these years.
Surreal atrocities and ironic black
farces
you didn’t know whether to laugh or
cry at.
As I get older, little archipelagoes of
memories
surface from that lost continent of
childhood
before it broke up and went its
separate ways.
I take little doses of depression
everyday
to immunize myself against the poison
of all those people who threw
themselves
like bad meat down the wishing wells of
the children
we did an unconvincing job of being,
so little joy in the way we looked at
ourselves
when no one else was. Salvage and
shipwrecks.
Time insulates and buffs, brokers and
deals,
but it does not heal. You love someone,
and you loved them even before
you learned how to feel, and they’re
in
a worse mess than you are, and you burn
to help them out like one constellation
to another,
a bear trap in a marijuana patch baited
like Andromeda chained and helpless on
the rocks
and you want to slay the inevitability
of dragons,
but all you’ve got for a sword is the
hand of a clock
and the courage of a badly mauled heart
and thirty-seven light years of
remembering
your unspeakable silence on a Saturday
morning
and the tenderness of you leaning your
head
against my shoulder as we walked
as if I were the mountain and you
were the avalanche looking for someone
to hold on to you like a meteor shower
at the end of an era of one-eyed
telescopes.
Hope you’re a nurse somewhere now in
the world.
Clean sheets and a compassionate
bedside manner.
Maybe staring out of a window on the
nightward
at the stars above and the city lights
below
as we used to look down from Mt. Tolmie
to see the firefly of Port Angeles
across the Georgia Strait
like a sister galaxy, Messier 31,
in the Great Square of Pegasus
where I buried our new myth of origin
in that constellation I made up for us
like a time capsule of what we could
save
of our childhoods, and never dig up
again.
O but that fathomless silence on
Saturday morning
like a black hole in the sunshine, and
the sky,
the injured bird in your eyes, has
taught me more
about the crazy wisdom of compassion
and the injustice of suffering before
you had a voice
to shriek it as if your nails were
striating glass
like a diamond-cutter or a snow blind
glacier
or a mirror you clawed until it bled
red roses,
than my last eight books and four
awards for poetry have.
Every anti-hero needs an anti-muse of
dark energy
to fire things up like a cold furnace
in a lighthouse on the dark side of the
moon,
that doesn’t listen to its own storm
warnings
and goes off in a lifeboat to look for
you
as if I could still keep you from
drowning
in a sea of shadows after all these
years.
Three bells and all’s well, I hope.
Though probability’s seldom esteemed
for the prophet it is. You left me your
silence,
as if nothing else could answer me,
and I’ve been listening in my
solitude ever since
for the hush of your shoes coming down
the hospital hall.
PATRICK WHITE
