Taking An Upbeat Flambuoyant Approach Toward Catastrophe Poem by Patrick White

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Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada

Taking An Upbeat Flambuoyant Approach Toward Catastrophe



Taking an upbeat flambuoyant approach toward catastrophe.
A good attitude to go on perishing by.
Adept at it.
Like Atlantis happy enough
if it can find a horizon
let alone a lifeboat on it.
Been doing it my whole life.
Because more than once I've contended
for and against myself
I was born fortunately too stupid to be a cynic.
Optimism is the heaviest cross of all to bear
up a hill of skulls stacked there by Mongols
who wanted to know if the myth of Sisyphus
were true or not and somehow got my apostasy
mixed up with his
and mistakenly crucified the absurd
on top of Mt. Sumeru, the world mountain,
to get the city of God to surrender without a fight.
I'm the last two apocryphal commandments
that were driven out into the desert
like the twin scapegoats
of the baker's dozen
and the carpenter' inch
when the other ten went metric.
Love a lot and you'll know what to do
without being told to.
Or, option B, heed none of the above
and take your chances
freelancing out along the razor's edge
like an ice breaker
looking for a northwest passage through your throat.
Pretty radical for a rootless tree like me
who didn't set out in life to be
the rolling stone that kicked off an avalanche
like a slow boy playing toe-hockey with a mountain
on a thatched road on his way home from night school.
Fool, said my muse to me
as if it were talking to Sir Philip Sydney
look into your heart and write.
And you can tell by the colour of my lips
I've been drinking eclipses out of an inkwell ever since
convinced I'm a fallen sparrow in an ailing kingdom
that's been sipping elixirs like cocktails
out of a holy grail with little black umbrellas in it
that keep blooming in the house
like a black mass of bad luck.
I tried emptiness once
like a home-brewed remedy for heart burn
that tasted like Peking duck on a pyre of gasoline.
But the void spit me out
like the Johnny Appleseed of sacred syllables
so whenever I try to meditate my way back into the void
through the backdoor
I don't chant aum, but ouch
and the dark night of my soul
deepens into the anti-enlightenment
of the sinister dark matter at hand
like a Sicilian family at the beginning
of twentieth century New York
where they ghettoize the scapegoats
each according to their ethnicity
so you can recognize them
like the logos of brand-names,
the yellow stars, the black hands,
the four leaf clovers, the West Side stories
of the Spanish moons in partial eclipse
or if there's anyone else there like me,
dressed in the skull and crossbones
I wear like my heart on my sleeve.
It's three a.m., for example,
in a crummy Holiday Inn hotel room
overlooking Lake Ontario
where the dead fish
surface belly-up like U-boats along the shore
and a naked fan of my poetry
off in dreamland without me
looks like a mermaid washed up
in the surf of the bedsheets on her own rocks.
I'm sitting in the dark
before a wide-screen window
trying to make out the constellations
through the light pollution of Kingston
the way I used to reconstruct secret messages
like the Rosetta Stone
in grade four
from the few letters that were left
when the chalkboard wasn't completely erased
by some windshield wiper of a teacher
trying to change the subject in a hurry
like some white-wash graffiti artist under a bridge
that didn't want to get caught in the cover-up
that lied to the whole class
about the iron pyrite truths
that lay ahead of us
like a bright future of fools' gold.
But even if the starlight's been diminished
by a smear campaign
that's going to take more than Windex to undo
and they've lost some of their criminal lustre
I still see in each of those rogue stars
the dark boat of a rum-runner
beached like me with a mermaid
in the labyrinth of the Thousand Islands
ten years after the lifting of prohibition left
everyone with a hangover for the rest of their lives
knocking their heads against a locked door
like the yachts in the docks below me.
There are some poets like Shakespeare
who recommend giving airy nothing
a local habitation and a name
and I'm not calling him a rat;
it's good advice for all honest citizens of the universe
when they're talking to the cops,
but it smacks a little too much of the snitch to me
and I'm sitting here with my mouth shut
staring blankly out
into the airy nothing of this night sky
trying to write a poetic alibi
for why I've got nothing to say
and even when the heat gets turned up so high
there's sweat on the inside of the one-way windows,
I still refuse to squeal on yesterday.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Martin O'Neill 21 February 2012

Quite a ride there, Patrick. I enjoyed the scenery too. Some marvellous lines

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946 / 834
Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada
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