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
