They're Hanging Flowerpots From The Lamp Posts Again
They're hanging flowerpots from the lamp posts again
like a change of stars every spring, and between
the young trees that held their allotted postage stamp of ground
on both sides of the street, through a long winter,
they're turning up the soil in the whiskey barrels
as if they were digging up the corpse of a drunk
to see if he died sober or not or just accidentally fell in.
And I remember a man, used to live up there,
the second story window on the right, at the top
of a flight of sway-back stairs from carrying
two hundred years of the weight of the world
like the worn chakras and vertebrae
of a beast of burden that never woke
the serpent fire at the base of its spine
in time to free itself, but as the Arabs say
the donkey at the end
is in the lead when the line or the spine
which ever comes first, turns round.
May it be so for him who lived in a single room
for thirty years, cutting out pictures from magazines
and filing them according to their themes.
A testy, paranoid man, the black sheep of his family
who kept breaking his Faberge heart
on street girls who needed a place to stay for the night,
who could read his kind of sheet music
like an open violin case on a corner,
busking for the short end of the stick.
But it was love to him, and there were always
real tears at the end when he went back to his magazines
each time more bitter than before, to clip
the eyes out of the picture-music of his dreams
like dead flowers out of his bower of bliss in the spring.
He was a nocturnal man, half raccoon, he came out at night
to scavenge the streets as an unlicensed living off the grid.
Drugs, wallets, money, cigarettes, keys, condoms,
fancy jewelled watches with gold expansion bracelets
that had slipped from some drunk real estate agent's wrist.
And then he was told he was going to die,
fifty-five, kidney cancer, six months at the most,
and I was awed by how he accepted his death
with the silence and dignity of an everyday affair
people have been doing unnaturally for millions of years.
And he gave his clippings and collages
and the most precious treasures of his lost and found
away like pressed flowers to people all over town
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!