CONFABULATIONS IN THE PROTEAN LIGHT OF IMAGINATION

CONFABULATIONS IN THE PROTEAN LIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION

Confabulations in the protean light of the imagination

where all things live and die. Life is perishing creatively

with no good reasons why. Except we trust---

what choice?---it’s wise and reclusively forbearing

of the mistakes we had to make to survive. That

the light adjusts to the eye that receives it like a star

with a cold-hearted message from the thieves of fire

with wings on their heels like plumed serpents

sporting the horns of burning doves on the hermetic skulls

of their helmets. You paint the world you live in

as if you were painting for yourself with your eyes closed

like flowers in eclipse through an hourglass darkly.

You have to feel the colours through your fingertips

like throbbing shades of red, and venal hues of blue,

and sunflower yellow you can eat straight from the tube,

before you go mad as creosote in a stove-pipe asylum

that squats like a black hole in the middle of the room.

So many have died for the flimsiest of excuses,

you’re compelled sometimes to wonder about

life’s attitude toward itself, if it knows something we don’t

that allows it to hide behind the mystique of its deathmask

like a cult with the conviction dying is the gateway

to the apple orchards of paradise seeded by the fruits

of this one we took a big bite out of like a motherhood issue

with an aversion to apple piety. If sin is original

then the virtuous are plagiarists by contrasting anti-selves.

If life is such a heinous act, then death is a sin of omission.

No one’s ever asked to deal with their own absence.

Or maybe we’ll appeal to our more empathic exits

to conjure us back to the entrance of the labyrinth

where this seance began like the opening act

that starts like a little dance it does on our graves.

I’ve been waterclocking my way through thousands of lives

as long as I can remember the flatlining mindstreams

of the thousands of deaths that followed the day

into darkness like the lifelines on the palm of my hand

waving farewell like a nightbird disappearing

into the portentous silence that foreshadows the end of its song.

Maybe I’m just peeking through the ankh of my little keyhole

of eternity into the face of a stranger on my threshold

I once fathered like the prodigal changeling of myself

come back retroactively to claim me as one of its own.

Maybe death has a secret streak of hard compassion.

A diamond in the ore, because the first thing it does

is take away your eyes so you can’t see what’s happening to you,

like a medicine bag of gunpowder put around the necks

of fatty heretics about to light up like a votive candle to God

in the fiery eyes of the snakepit inquisition flushed

with the power of darkness to make a snuff film out of a virgin.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. There’s nothing but oblivion,

dust on the windowsill, urns of the stars

scattering their ashes on the roots of the roses

their own blossoming in fire once brought to bloom in the blood

like the saddest flower they’ve ever looked through the eyes of.

If that’s the case, just like any other night on earth

in the cosmic abyss, listening to the solitude long

for its nightbirds in this restless dream of life,

death doesn’t exist. No hiatus in the continuum

of awareness that persists in keeping us guessing.

Could be a curse. Could be a blessing.

PATRICK WHITE