DON'T KNOW WHOSE SCHOOL IT IS

DON’T KNOW WHOSE SCHOOL IT IS

Don’t know whose school it is, but three days a month

for the last few years it’s been trying to teach me

not to care about the things I’ve cherished most in life.

One of the sunset attitudes of old age? Maybe. Though

the jury’s out for lack of circumstantial evidence.

Even apocalypse disengages, but I see a glorious sunset

in the manes of the old lions driven out to walk alone like wisemen

who don’t want to go through all that ferocity again.

The sorrows ripen like bitter, green days into mellower dusks

vivid with swallows. The earth has been at things a long time.

Like a shoemaker that knows her craft. Like a midwife

and an undertaker on the same nightward, listening

to people die in their dreams like train whistles passing through.

The dead come and go here in this small town as

unceremoniously most of the time as they do anywhere else.

You’re friends or enemies with someone for forty years

and suddenly, one day, they just disappear, and you’re given

a few details and facts as to why, and everyone acts contrite

and steps back from the grave because they’re afraid,

prayers, testimonials and floral wreathes laid,

and you realize what a trivial gesture life is compared

to the immense forevers we occupy when we run out of time.

People hang breezy curtains over a black hole

and live on the other side of them peeking out their windows

as if they were looking through a glass darkly

at the solar coronas and haloes of a total eclipse,

trying to make light of how eyeless it is out.

Even the Neanderthals threw cornflowers

like the paint rags of blue skies in the graves of their children.

The dead stare straight up and the living mourn for themselves.

Life goes on as everyone swears it must as if

we were being whipped in some kind of Oregon land rush

to lay a claim to an idyllic cemetery of good bottom land

down by the river, or atop a hill, with a beautiful view

for the pioneer kids who died of scarlet fever

to watch the waterbirds returning to the flooded marsh below

as if there were hope for them yet. Pythagorean

transmigrations of souls in the bodies of birds

or the hearses of Canada geese that carry the Ojibway dead

south and west, once the bones in their medicine huts are dust,

aviaries of angels singing them to their rest.

Raleigh in the Tower the night before his death.

We live in jest, but we die in earnest. Though that strikes me

as more of a trope than a truth, at best, a good guess

it’s just as easy to go along with for the sake of the rhyme

as it is to contest the conclusion until you get there,

keeping in mind Emily Dickinson heard a fly buzz when she died.

Ever listen to an old man trying to be clever about his death?

How odiously underdeveloped it seems. I think animals

are more honest when the hawk falls and the rabbit screams.

Grey hair on the mountain and you’re stilling going

through a sea change of the Burgess Shale as if

you’re never going to grow out of yourself into something new.

Is personality retained like the Conservation of Data Principle

even in a black hole? Once here, though we always had to be,

are we indelible? The mindstreams of flooded pens

that can’t be washed out of our pockets even by

the great night sea of awareness that’s swimming toward us now?

Roman short swords of the gladiolas are sprouting

in the heritage cemetery like green scissors or the beaks

of insatiable baby birds beseeching their mother.

Fifty thousand thoughts a day, not counting

the infinite elaboration of incommensurable emotions.

I can’t look at a grave without thinking of the Library of Alexandria.

Skull bulbs. Do you believe there’s a connection?

Uneasy the sleep of the man who goes to bed at night

thinking he’s a success. Life walks us to our graves

and every step of the way we’ve been crossing thresholds

that are neither exits nor entrances in or out of here.

What a strange dream to believe it might be possible

to be fossilized by your own biosphere. Life doesn’t

let you linger in the doorway for very long before

it slams the coffin lid in your face for not stepping in

when you’re asked, for fear of tracking starmud into the house

as you did at the beginning, as you will at the end.

And this is the brave part. Either learn to drown

like a sea star in the efoliant oceans of the rose

or get ready to be lowered down into the ground

like a lifeboat that doesn’t float. Even as far as China

if you’re out seeking knowledge of spiritual states

or the Beagle rounding the coast of Tierra del Fuego.

Holy ghosts and Hox genes, mass, gravity, space, time,

light, matter, black and white, annihilant energies

quantumly entangled in each other’s creative lives

in the Vas Hermeticum of the alchemical earth

breeding regal quatternios of golden life

out of the ore of base metal, effluvial waterlilies

out of their own putrefaction. Conceptually neat

and numerically comforting, but emotionally unsatisfying

in its mystic details. The green dragon has mercurial eyes

that shine with a peculiar lustre all their own.

The most brilliant error a human can make

is to mistake themselves for an individual

they always wanted to meet. We die on familiar terms

with the strangers we’ve faithfully been to ourselves.

A mirage of fish pleading for the waters of life

from a housewell in a desert of stars when we’ve been

the real thing all along, though we keep seeking it

as if the inestimable gift were only of value

if and whenever we found it on our own. The Milky Way

smears a silver snail track across the starmap of the long way home.

Compassion compels the softer alloys of our souls

to humanize the oceanic abyss of consciousness that surrounds it

with habitable metaphors rooted in tangible sorrows and joys.

Even the earth must sometimes stop to wonder

if the dead ever miss it, and marvel at a flight of sea birds.

PATRICK WHITE