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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476971" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>They're Hanging Flowerpots From The Lamp Posts Again</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">They're hanging flowerpots from the lamp posts again <br>like a change of stars every spring, and between<br>the young trees that held their allotted postage stamp of ground<br>on both sides of the street, through a long winter, <br>they're turning up the soil in the whiskey barrels<br>as if they were digging up the corpse of a drunk <br>to see if he died sober or not or just accidentally fell in.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And I remember a man, used to live up there, <br>the second story window on the right, at the top <br>of a flight of sway-back stairs from carrying <br>two hundred years of the weight of the world <br>like the worn chakras and vertebrae<br>of a beast of burden that never woke<br>the serpent fire at the base of its spine <br>in time to free itself, but as the Arabs say <br>the donkey at the end <br>is in the lead when the line or the spine<br>which ever comes first, turns round.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">May it be so for him who lived in a single room <br>for thirty years, cutting out pictures from magazines<br>and filing them according to their themes.<br>A testy, paranoid man, the black sheep of his family <br>who kept breaking his Faberge heart <br>on street girls who needed a place to stay for the night, <br>who could read his kind of sheet music <br>like an open violin case on a corner, <br>busking for the short end of the stick. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">But it was love to him, and there were always <br>real tears at the end when he went back to his magazines<br>each time more bitter than before, to clip<br>the eyes out of the picture-music of his dreams <br>like dead flowers out of his bower of bliss in the spring. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">He was a nocturnal man, half raccoon, he came out at night <br>to scavenge the streets as an unlicensed living off the grid. <br>Drugs, wallets, money, cigarettes, keys, condoms, <br>fancy jewelled watches with gold expansion bracelets <br>that had slipped from some drunk real estate agent's wrist.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And then he was told he was going to die, <br>fifty-five, kidney cancer, six months at the most, <br>and I was awed by how he accepted his death <br>with the silence and dignity of an everyday affair<br>people have been doing unnaturally for millions of years.<br>And he gave his clippings and collages <br>and the most precious treasures of his lost and found <br>away like pressed flowers to people all over town<br>and when I asked him, sitting on the sidewalk <br>on the front step of his place, what he was going to do <br>in these last six months of his life, he said <br>I want to eat in every restaurant in town before I'm dead. <br>And he almost did, except for Mexican, <br>before I last saw him as I imagined he looked<br>under a closed coffin lid at a shabby wake<br>that pointed out which one he was <br>in his high school year book <br>with all the eyes cut out.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And you could live here for a hundred and fifty years<br>among the tribal locals of the highlands of Lanark<br>like an old testament prophet on a hobby farm <br>and still be considered too weird to sit at their table <br>without realizing you're still not one of them, <br>though you're tolerated like another fieldstone <br>in the wall with the steel gate that separates <br>one cemetery from another, not according<br>to how you died, or what you lived for, <br>but who you lived with on Foley Mountain <br>or in the back woods up around Fernleigh and Ardoch<br>where the people look up at the stars and wait like rocks<br>for the last two and a half centuries. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">He wasn't one of them, hardly anyone here is<br>where only the black flies are drawn to the smell <br>of an outsider until two days of intense heat <br>kills them off at the end of May, and you're free to stay <br>as long as you like in the tiny one room <br>apartment of your mind, trying to make <br>strays and runaways stay awhile, linger a bit <br>on the last step of the stairwell<br>they're climbing down from heaven on <br>as if life were the bannister of a free ride to the bottom <br>and that was the best a furtive creature like he was <br>could expect to snatch from life for him and his cat <br>and exaggerate into an expanding universe <br>from a single random atom of love<br>before it all imploded in on him under its own mass <br>like a black dwarf with nothing left to look forward to <br>but a black hole they lower you into like a dead lifeboat<br>into the oceanic awareness of the starless sea before you<br>with an admiral's hat made of old magazines<br>that took the journeys you should have taken years ago<br>like the paper boats of Li Po down the Yangtze River.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Wary of bliss, because you've made your happiness<br>a nest in the depths of your desperate solitude <br>too important not to bobble the ball or the cosmic egg<br>like a translucent bubble smeared in sticky rainbows <br>out of fear of its loss, you can turn into the very thorn <br>you've feared most of your life is going <br>to burst your bubble into tears <br>that you made yourself in a hall of mirrors<br>look so foolish chasing it like the eyes<br>of beauty in the beholder with a butterfly net, <br>and when that doesn't work, just as often as not, <br>stairwells of flypaper trying to catch the falling stars, <br>and put them in your pocket, and never let them fade away.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And he wasn't a good earner with lots of candle power<br>so he had to traffic his experience for their lost innocence<br>like a blind lighthouse in love with fireflies <br>that could see him better than he <br>could ever see them or himself.<br>Love loses the mystery of the inconceivably real<br>once it becomes a deal in life, a tit for tat.<br>Most young women know that by the time <br>they're fifteen these days, and especially the runaways<br>couch surfing in the archives of ardent stamp collectors. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">But it strikes me as too facile for those <br>who are luckier in life and love to judge him <br>from a few snippets of gossip on the local mill wheel <br>grinding the gist of the issue down to something digestible, <br>and barely a mention in the paper worth cutting out. <br>And, who knows, maybe if he had lived as he had died, <br>offered a last meal, he should have tried <br>everything on the menu that life had to offer him, <br>stood astride himself like a colossus of a lighthouse <br>in the face of the storm on that dangerous coast <br>he never got to see, instead of sitting in his room <br>waiting for some mermaid who wasn't singing to him <br>call him to the rocks as if she were coming to his rescue<br>like a black and white issue of a pin-up movie queen <br>in an old back issue of Life magazine.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And there's plenty of people with more rocks around here<br>than they know what to do with to cast the first stone, <br>like the kissing stone of the Kaaba in the filthy hands <br>of the local Taliban at a romantic man and woman<br>trying to find some love in life in Afghanistan<br>just the same as they are in Ompah tonight. <br>But the only rock this delinquent would throw <br>through his window if I were ever going to <br>would be the full moon at the ghost of the scarecrow<br>breaking bitter bread with himself <br>at his own harvest table, to get up out of his grave <br>like a lunatic with a happier appetite for life and love<br>and like the longing of the crow and the wolf on the moonlit hill <br>call out for more than he ever knew how or what to ask for, <br>except in the way he died, nobly, without a word of reproach, <br>as if a long-standing empty prophecy <br>had been at last wholly fulfilled by the menu <br>of almost every restaurant in Perth, <br>where a blue moon in late October <br>served second helpings of a last meal <br>to a condemned man of no little worth to those of us <br>who admired the equanimity and grace of the way <br>he pushed his chair away when he'd had enough <br>and left the table like a pair of scissors <br>on the cutting edge of life for good.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476971" data-title="They're Hanging Flowerpots From The Lamp Posts Again de Patrick White" data-description="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 soi..."></div>
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