Mostly Sad Poem by Patrick White

Mostly sad. Long dolorous drops of molten bells
tired of calling the faithful to prayer
and the cannon getting all of the attention.
No particular beef with life and only a few in it.
I'm reading poetry on my sixty-fourth birthday Saturday night
for my supper and the Canada Council.
A sticker for my license plate so I don't get taken
off the road by a cop at a traffic stop,
and maybe, though it's doubtful,
a free day or two to write without,
at this old stump of a desk like a snow hare,
the ferocious exigencies of an underwhelming reality
they haven't found on the grid of their corporate greed yet.

Always try to put my heart into it
but right now I'm using my three and a half pounds
of cranial starmud as a doorstop to all my stargates
and I don't really care whether or not
communication is blocked between me
and the fire hydrants sitting along the street
like squat little walk-in gurus with nothing else to do
when the Sky Dragon Restaurant isn't setting itself on fire
but meditate full lotus while the heritage lamp posts
pray with their heads bowed like narcissi and daffodils.

And if you were to ask me how I was feeling
I'd probably say, today, all my emotions
are smoke without fire. Candle wax in daylight
with a little black wick in the middle
disgruntled it isn't a fuse that's lighting anything up.
Wonder if anyone else ever feels sometimes
their life's a consolation prize that doesn't console?
A rare singularity at the bottom of a black hole?
One of four prizes at the bottom of a crackerjack box?

Today stale bread has more character than I do
but, hey, it isn't time to start feeding the pigeons
in Stewart Park yet, or filling a bucket of wild oats
I'll still be sowing in the grave, to feed
Ian Miller's big brass statue of Big Ben
leaping through the spotlight of a prime time moon.

Got one friend I can openly talk to in this town.
He's a carpenter-cook and brings me dinner
when I'm down. He's a man of the people
and I'm a somewhat embittered not so sacred warrior clown
surrealistically committed to writing things down
like a waterclock from one window to the next
as if my seeing were shapeshifting time
and I could take Arcturus going down
over the tarpaper rooftops of Perth
and burn it into my hard drive like an asterisk
on the computer screen of my third eye.

Live behind windows most of the time
like a deus ex machina with my three goldfish
in an aquarium because I don't want
to be estranged by the conciliatory looks
on the faces of the workaday people's souls
as I explain how hard I work like a madman
for half a century now, at not making a living.
And they all say, don't worry, because they've
seen the movie of the agony and the ecstasy,
you'll be rich after your dead, and it feels
like a community slap on the back of a corpse.

I don't try to pour the ocean into a teacup anymore
and intuitively take the measure of everybody's skull
like a phrenologist looking for the brim of the brow
to determine what's full for them, and to each,
like a vapour of mist rising off a morning lake,
or a sunami of stars like the Milky Way, I pour
Zen tea out like a Japanese Chanoyu ceremony
and talk about how you can turn anything you do in life
from making a chair, to raising a baby, or driving a back hoe
into the do of an enlightenment path. Nor is a calling
a job or a career you could marry to your daughter
and be happy about, though way too many poets
seem to have forgotten that in the pursuit of their hobby.

If you're not dying or living for it like a junkie, you're a liar.
Insincere. Sine cera. A bust of Caesar made of wax
because there wasn't time before the triumph
to finish it in marble. And if you get caught,
it would be wise to make him laugh at your duplicity
or your effigy could be next. Just a thought.