PLEASE PROVIDE CAMOUFLAGE

IMAGE: KAth Boake W

Though disconnected during these pandemic years I continue to seek. Compose. For you, rough draft of a prose poem, my first in many years, inspired by dear friend Jhim Pattison; sweet, kooky neo-surrealist whom I miss terribly. We could talk for hours, about everything and nothing. An avowed alchemist, Jhim was a stalwart guide on my inward journey toward peace.

 

 

CAMOUFLAGE 

The land is a mother that never dies. Who said that? Victor would know. The 80s was the video decade and 1989 the year my dear friend Victor’s mother videotaped her will, farewells. Tenderness immortalized. My friend was not left out of the will, in fact Victor was the executor. A good son, the kind of son I would be fortunate to reproduce someday, a fine young man, foreign concept in the 80s. Aside from Victor, who shared unerringly, especially his apparitions. Blackbird red against a sky wall of dust, paper doll in firewater, deer head in earthquake debris, uncovering an angel face in the snow. “Yours!” Orca shadow on the incoming tide. Gila monsters, boulders and yucca trees. He took me to the sleeping giant desert, to hear with my own ears thrumming deep within bells of pale blooms, in the fossils of mammoths, sloths and giant bears. Look down. Beneath our feet. Treasure! Look up, past your head. Condors bending the boughs, light a diaphanous linen sheet. Beats! From within, from without. People being people must conjure up gods though red army ants conquer these hills each day. He took me because I forgot to leave. “See, it’s painless.” Let’s live here, in that cloud-cloaked cottage of stone, kit foxes for neighbours. Look at the way she moves through the chaparral! Loping, then bounding, coat the colour of sand, invisible to golden eagles. Cloak me Victor, please provide camouflage. You’re the only soul who can.

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