Ghosts

We have descended
from an ageless bliss.

There we were
instantly and innocently
revealed to each other,
clearly, at a glance,
with wordless immediacy,
known to each other
with constant unremarked intimacy,
imperturbable in our bright array
by each other's side

upon thrones of pure perfection.

It was sufficient for us to behold

and bear witness to each other,
for everything to be exposed

to our eyes' effortless regard
and accepted by our heart's
infinite tenderness,
and when we walked
it was in temples and palaces
and when we talked
it was of the miracle of a world
constituted to make love possible,
a world made sense of
only by the rule of love,
a world where love without end
was the sum of all knowledge.

What we now consider knowledge
is merely the dim outline

of the all that has fallen into darkness
and is obscure in this era of our great forgetting,

whose duration cannot be reckoned
because we have forgotten when it started,

                                                     
for we have come down to this place,
here, now, where we slowly, inevitably,
ruin each other's lives

with each inept encounter:

every utterance an inadvertent insult

ricocheting loudly off target,
words cheapened by the trade

and tedious barter of their meanings,
to become mere implements to brandish,
branches and broken things waved
in a futile ape-show of aggression,

as we condescend to describe each other
only in terms of what we want,
congratulating ourselves
for our sophisticated insinuations,
the limited yet elaborate scope,

and precise clarifications of our display;

or the means to beat the drum

so that we can pace and shuffle
through the rituals with which we mark

the interval of time and space
to which we are now heir in this place,
tethered to the illusions of a flesh

that we use to trespass upon each other,
that we clutch and fumble as an escape
rather than as a celebration,

                                           
and afterwards we part

and wander the streets
alone like mute ghosts,
no longer able
even to summon the meagre effort
for a pretence of communication,

and the world is a wind
that passes through us,
leaving us cold and empty
in our exhaustion and vagrancy,
attenuated and aimless,

beneath the slow captive orbit
of the white stone eye of night,

an eye which indifferently observes us,
clouded and pale with a blindness

that balances everywhere and nowhere
in the dim crepescular equivalence of all things.
Where once there were temples and palaces
we walk among the wreckage
of our failed imagination,

but one of us

finds a forgotten tarnished crown
rattling in a gutter,
another some scattered pearls 

strung together once again
along discarded sinew of some carrion,

a third a rank rotting ermine robe
rescued from emboldened rats

who once called it home.
We wear our garments.
We raise temples in the clouds
and build our palace on the moon
and now, at least,

are able to bear the sight of each other
once again,
arrayed in undisguised dilapidation,
to conceal what we have become.