This  is a devious, dubious virtued lady

to find in Opposition to one’s intentions, doings, directions.

 

Unless one evokes no echo, casts no shadow, bows to no idol

she will bemuse, seduce, deceive with her confusing ways

 the dissembling images at her disposal:

-  reflecting back one’s projections in distorting mirrors

with strange optical effects and hallucinatory vistas

thrown at odd angles, tangents.

 

Siren of dreams, wishes, she!

She has no boundaries, knows none.

Truth and Un are but variations

on an undifferentiated theme.

Her edges are blurred in slippery mirages;

spinner of elusive myth

she weaves her cobweb death traps with ethereal threads

and delineates her pastel landscapes

with the rose-tinted lenses of fancy

- regardless of dreary fact.

 

In her own subterranean house - fluid root

she is secure, “at home”

element and environ in harmony.

There, her soft light shines clearly

becoming perlucid, fairy-fabled

the shifting shapes and essences, eclectic

 of the spirit - in their own right.

 

But remove her from that safe place

and she metamorphoses into a shimmery quagmire of rainbows

a cavorting chimera of indefinable ubiquity

subtly threatening, alluring

- distance, substance, relation, seperateness

all zonked, zany, sizzled, tangled together

- which is she?  Or it?  Or I?

She, embodying one’s own interior scenery, extrapolated

- inversely, conversely, perversely inside-outwards;

her chameleon aura  absorbing and refracting

surfaces and segments in accordance with

her policy of Dissolution, Dissipation

…isn’t it said that she is - endlessly

antipathetical  to the concept of limits!

 

Coming face to face, head-on across the Zodiac

one could reasonably have concluded

that she might dump those subversive tricks and special effects

her sly angles and side-long approaches

and have to look one in the eye

minas those masks, acts and guises

- at least for a degree or two!

 

But no!

In opposition

she calls forth and confronts us

with our illusiveness and subjectivity!

rendering Which is Who all the more inconclusive

and even passing on the blame

to some mortal surrogate, Watergate style

 to hide behind:

treachery, loss, deception or just plain muddle

personified, very nicely if you please, externally

- never attributable to her - she?  forget it!

No-one will ever pin her down

put her back up to the wall.

She will just slither away, evanesce, transmogrify

….and only later will it be found that, in the process

she has absconded

with one’s ID card, one’s hopes, one’s credit account

 

…or, if one was lucky

(or something true)

just with one’s illusions.

 

 

Nov 1988