There's Nothing Cozy About Real Beauty
There’s nothing cozy about real beauty.
That’s why it scares you to death
when you’re around it. You sense
that it disdains to kill you
simply because it knows it can
but that only makes you beg for the knife
even more, even deeper, until
you’ve suffered more death
than you ever knew there was to suffer.
It’s the same with the truth. The truth
isn’t the act of a well-meaning
coffee-table sentiment,
a hundred dollar book
of recycled paper
to help save the Caribou,
an a chequered impressionist table-cloth
with compositionally balanced butter-knives
that have never tasted blood in their lives.
If you can’t hear the shriek
of the red-tailed hawk as it plunges
toward a mating pair of killdeer
executing an aerial ballet in May
that would make you cry it’s so beautiful,
you can’t hear the hummingbirds
at the holly hocks either
even if you know sign language.
And no more than the truth, poetry
isn’t a mirror you hold up to nature
with preconceived notions of what
you want to see reflected there.
In hunting season around here
the truth can bleed Bambi upside down
from the bough of a willow
that let’s its golden tresses down
all the way to the ground
until its tips are dyed in blood.
The truth can tear the heart of a wolf out
and eat it raw in front
of a classroom of schoolchildren
while it’s still beating.
Go ask any child army.
Go ask any street kid in Ottawa
or any bushwhacked adolescent in Lanark.
You asked me to read your poems
without holding anything back from you
and I have and I won’t.
You keep a tidy house
on the right side of the tracks
of a zodiac with astro-turf lawns.
And I see all your candles
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poem by Patrick White
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