MAYBE IF WE ALL STARTED OUT

MAYBE IF WE ALL STARTED OUT

for Pat, Jeremy, Sarah and Sean

to the memory of their mother, Linda Robertson

Maybe if we all started out relating to each others’ deaths

we’d do a lot better loving one another while we’re alive.

Even in the heart of the swallow, the great finality

of our blood dropping the heavy red curtains on the play

stepping out of them from a womb like the sea

contained in a medicine bag of water with nine holes in it always

leaking out of itself like a body learning to walk on land,

loosely mastering one medium after another, water for land,

land for air, air for space until we get to the gateway

of the clear light of the void where the masters unlearn

their wisdom to go skinny-dipping in their eyes again

forgetting everything about what it was they were supposed to know

as they revel in being more buoyant than innocence or bliss.

Before we step back behind the curtains to listen for an encore.

This is the floating world where the waterclocks

run like wavelengths, serpents, Pleiosaurs, Loch Ness monsters,

as if someone were stitching the seam of a lake up

like a sail they intend to raise like a moonrise

on the masts of the tree line anchored in earth like a fleet in port.

And the waterlilies rooted like the rigging

of our lifelines, umbilical and spinal cords

to our starmud, are what the hands of a clock do

in their off time, or when they withdraw their shadows at noon

and time stops as if its petals had returned

to the bud again like a snake with its tail in its mouth.

Dark abundance fulfilling the potential of its bright vacancy

over and over again like a stranger walking down

a long road alone, all her thoughts and feelings,

shadows of the moon, stars breaking unspeakably beautiful

through the crowns of the trees intimately whispering

to one another, Who is she? Who is she?

As her imagination welds the wounded shards

of the constellations, gathers up every splinter of a star

she’s washed out of her eyes in tears, or plucked

like a thorn from her foot that pierced her

like the path she was on at the time like a firewalk

and makes of all that light, not a broken starmap,

but a mirror she can see her face in like a housewell

scanning the sky for fireflies like the first signs of her arrival.

Who among the evergreens has ever been

so intimate with death they know enough to fear it?

Hasn’t life been carrying us forth as long as death

has been eloping with the bride? The empty bucket

of the new moon tangled in morning glory

is lowered like a coffin into the dark waters of life

and winched up by the wheel of birth and death

comes up like the lost coin we retrieved from the river

like the one they place between our teeth when we die

full and bright as the harvest moon everytime

we take a bath in our own graves without holding our breath

like pearl divers seeking the white and black eyes of the moon

in the depths of their souls as we rise and fall

like Orphic skulls, shipwrecks and eclipses

bobbing and sinking on our own thought-waves,

the mountains we climb as high as the valleys we plunge into

are deep and inexplicable. Everyone, even a Buddha,

is a sophomore of life on earth. Foolishly wise, wisely foolish,

but look how dangerous it is to send our children to school

to learn about death as if it were something

you couldn’t hide from them by closing your eyes

like the happy ending of a fairytale they’ll out grow

believing in like garden snakes shedding their skin

as if you lied to them without meaning to because

death isn’t anything you can live your way through

without accepting the dark wisdom of the enlightened eclipse

even at noon that folds the tents of the flowers up

and sends them back to their beginnings

like the unopened loveletters of the pine cones

that bloom in fire, and the night lilies that open

the eyes of the water to the mysteries and metaphors

they hold in common with the root fires of the stars.

Our seeing is a living turmoil of mud and water

not a glass shard we’re looking through darkly

to protect our vision from the sun in eclipse

as if you had to wait till you got to heaven to clean your lens

or wipe the dirt and crumbs of a bad dream out of your eyes.

Whenever we occasionally come to peace with ourselves

like a sea of awareness on good terms

with its own mental weather, kingfishers in the sunlight,

skimming the fire-gilded waves, or no one

in the wheelhouse of the zodiac in a great, Pacific storm,

everything is reflected clearly in the stars and the clouds

that pass overhead like the prayer beads of the Canada geese

returning like empty urns in the spring to gather up

the dead again when the leaves begin to fly in the fall

and take them somewhere eternal where they get

to shine a light on it all like a new medium

they’re learning to work with to express themselves

as sentience always will like a hidden secret

that wanted to be known by whispering whole galaxies

in the black holes of our ears listening like seashells

on the far shores of the islands of light we’re washed up on

like a message in a bottle we sent to ourselves in a past life

like the Cutty Sark, and arks of doves and crows under full sail

we sent out looking for land, knowing full well, one

would be delayed by what it found as its feathers changed

from white to black, and the other would be sent back

like a sign of peace that rinsed the bloodstain of the red sky

in the morning like a false dawn out of the white flags of surrender

that blow like curtains of snowbunting and white star

from the open windows of spring gaping in incredulity

at what time it is with so many hands of the wildflowers

pointing at all hours of the clock, day and night, as if there were

time enough for everything when the mindstream

weathers the flashflood of its own tears and comes to rest

like the Burgess Shale at the top of a mountain far to the west.

Sophocles once said never to have been born is best

as if death were the solution to the tragic horror of a painful dilemma.

When has life ever not been just as open behind us

as it is up ahead? But surely his one-eyed advice is the crutch

and flying buttress lambda leans on and not to die

like the Conservation of Data Principle in a black hole doesn’t

is the better of two worlds when less is more and more is less

and death doesn’t spread the lungs of the hourglass out

like the wingspan of a blood eagle or the waters of the Red Sea

closing up after us like wounded curtains healing after the play.

More like immortal bees returning to their hives at night

to churn honey out of the eyes that looked upon them in the light

and tasted the sweetness of life at work in the starfields

in the belt of Orion, in the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades,

in the Mons Veneris of the Beehive star cluster between

Regulus in Leo and Castor and Pollux in Gemini

gleaming like first magnitude insights into why

we die to live and live to die like fireflies and stars

rising like new constellations over the event horizons

of our eyes that never fail like waterlilies to take us by surprise.

PATRICK WHITE