Thursday, October 23, 2008

NEITHER UPLIFTED NOR UPLIFTING

NEITHER UPLIFTED NOR UPLIFTING


Neither uplifted nor uplifting

you array your ideas like eggs

in little tree-bound nests of knowledge

you can’t seem to break out of.

And you won’t fly out of your own eye

until you’ve measured the sky in wings

so nothing sings in the tree on the moon

you’ve planted like a flag.

And here is a place with a broken gate

and a shattered window

you don’t return to much anymore

like the return address of a painful loveletter.

You’re deep and you’re smart and you’re dark and you’re weird

as if your life were a secret

that’s trying to keep you.

And when I talk to you like this

and it’s good to be open and honest,

it’s strange how we always

end up in the same lifeboat

with a cargo of skulls that look like the moon.

But you asked and I’ll answer

one delusion with another

because I’m bored

and I haven’t heard an original lie in years

that could rival the last one

that flamed out like a brutal mode of clarity,

a martyr to the ferocity of its own insight.

Do I stink of enlightenment?

Do I reek of delusion?

One is aware.

The other aware of being aware.

And it all somehow seems so crucially absurd

you try to doctor every word

like grains of sand in the sea

or a third world country

proudest when it’s begging from the blessed

trying to get things off your luxurious chest

like a budget that went down in defeat.

And though you’re neater than a needle in your probing

the stitches keep coming undone

like the rungs of an unlucky ladder

or a wound that healed like a zipper.

How easy it was to love you

when you came naked to my bed and my body

and the life of meaning

was fire and moon and kells of blood

more than the meaning of life.

We didn’t mean anything then.

It was enough to be the effulgence of our own wayward energies,

and say things to each other

that can only be said in fingertips and braille,

to walk barefoot across our own stars

and taste things with our eyes

like the bells and the masses and the wafers

of the mystic eclipses in the snakefire

that burned for more than a year,

and know things in our hearts

about each other

that are once and silent and clear.


PATRICK WHITE