CRUCIAL DELUSIONS

Thinking sometimes I may have gone in too far

and rendered myself mad on metaphors, thinking sometimes

the river’s turning has degraded into a metaphysical noose

and I’m the prime candidate for some kind of exotic extinction,

with or without enlightenment, and considering too

the exponential myriads of incommunicable interpretations,

as many as the radiant directions of a single shining, though even that

is saying too much, too little, or nothing at all,

I sit here in front of a computer screen,

smoking, drinking black coffee, priming the morning

like an eerie stranger to spring, even the willow

under the church spire, exalting

in its being poured out of something into something

like a waterclock. Over my life, as far back as I can remember,

even in daylight, even in the green morning,

I have always walked under a dark shadow of sky, a long night

that has fallen like a palladium, or radioactive dust

from an ancient, nuclear winter I must have survived

to wonder what food-chain I’m part of now. Who

can understand the myriad selves in a single moment,

the thousands of temples

whose foundations are sapped and torched in a blink of the void

when slavery changes masters and one by one

we become part of the new linkage, precisely

where we are most empty, most apprehensively free,

contriving a bond we can belong to, something

proportional to our courage to be, to create

a delusion that might convince us for awhile that understanding

is not beyond our capacity to make things up

and forget it all began as a kind of play.

In the brevity of always, I am the dark clarity

of the unnamed witness who is and isn’t me,

and I am the actor cast into the stage lights

of the dream and the dreamer, not the thread

of the tiniest spider between them. What

I see of myself, when I’m the cowled observer,

is a long night alone with time and the stars

among the vast indiscriminate deserts

that particulate our despairing monuments and distinctions.

I drink from my own muddy well of wisdom,

looking deeply into the perversion of my reflection

for any sign of love, for any

sign of assent in the light of my glacial seeing. Never

have I been assured of anyone or any part

I’ve ever played to the single occupied seat in the house

that neither applauds nor condemns

from the cold intimacy of its throne

the antics of these crucial delusions, deliberate or spontaneous,

that adorn the mental marquees, the garish neon

of the all-night feature that is me.

The same appalling silence greets the hero

as commends the clown, the theater itself

the owl of an inconclusive afterlife

enacted alike in a brothel or a shrine. No word

from the other side

has ever flowered here, no

ground of being ever sprouted keys to unlock

the efflorescence of this urgent spring, to liberate

the farce of my unknowing

from these straitjackets of affirmation and denial

and let me live sufficiently beyond both

on the nothing I am and the nothing I am not.

PATRICK WHITE