ONE EARTH, ONE THIRD EYE, ONE WILD IRIS OF LIFE IN SPACE

ONE EARTH, ONE THIRD EYE, ONE WILD IRIS OF LIFE IN SPACE

One earth, one third eye, one wild iris of life in space.

Nacreously pearled out of the darkness of death,

no, not even death, but the godhead of nothing,

this our crib, our grave, when our flesh falls like snow

from our leafless limbs in the spring and dissolves

back into the womb we’ve never been out of.

Who fouls their own mother like the place where they live?

Who would climb up their umbilical cord to heaven

like a waterlily anchored in a swamp and sever the connection

like the jugular of their mother’s throat, before, and before

is as endless as forever after, amen, she’s brought them to term

under a blue eyelid smeared by a patina of air as thin

as the mirage of the dream she conceived them in?

Five billion times around the sun, that star

we’re all courtiers in the presence of, five billion times

hung like the earring of a shepherd moon in an orbit

through your earlobe and we’ve managed to turn it

into a game of Russian roulette with the microbial dawn

of our own existence when she conceived of us

like a water palace of life out of her own translucency,

the firefly of an inspired thought that crossed her mind

and nudged us into being, this sentient seeing we smear

with the effluvia of our own offal then turn away in revulsion

from what we see in the mirror that repels us from us,

from each other, trying to get away from the loss of face

we made ourselves in the image of. This military-industrial,

late Bronze Age megalith of warring heroes who

distorted our vision of love by fletching it with arrows

we’re as vulnerable to as an Achilles heel.

It’s time, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to upgrade

our metaphors to more peaceful myths of origin

we create among ourselves so every thought and act

every ocean of emotion that neaps and ebbs in our tidal hearts

is in accord with the facts of who we imagine ourselves to be.

Time to swim out of the hourglass we drown our sorrows in

down to the last drop, and learn to live galactically

or what was the point of getting high in the first place?

Nature doesn’t abhor a vacuum as much as she must us by now.

Let’s clean our act up so our lover doesn’t turn away from us

toward another that doesn’t offend the protocols

of her incomparable beauty and inconceivable intelligence.

Hey, you, who put the longing in the nightbird’s song?

Who put the awe in your heart when you’re kissed by stars?

Who humanized you out of the ore and oxygen of meteors

stone by stone on the grave of an Archaic native

with a bird bone flute that still wasn’t enough weight

to keep the music of life from arising out of death

like a poem out of the mouths of deaf-mutes that spoke

for trillions of stars through their eyes? When

you look at a river can’t you feel the melody line

of your own blood and mind behind the picture-music?

One earth, one third eye, one wild iris of life in space,

iron, stone, water, air, ion and this the frailest

sphere of mind, this aura of awareness,

these neurons and dendritic axons of our cities at night

we all resonate in like the wavelengths of fish

jumping for the stars, fireflies over the water,

this sentience of ours, this exalted mode of dirt

we’ve been raised out of by this earth breaking

into consciousness, a young planet waking from a dream

she had of us to find we’re all as true as she is

to the same roots she’s welling up out of like apple bloom,

like the spine-stems of ladders to the moon,

like the interdependent origins of insight and stone,

all one body, born of the same cells, to shine, do you hear me,

back at the stars, the trees, the sky, rivers, clouds,

thermophilic bacteria in hot diamond mines,

fire like the mad passion of a genius swept up

like a poppy immolated in the blooming of its own flames,

as if we were opening our eyes to look upon our mother’s face

like the very first dawn, and we had only one smile

like the fertile crescent of a waxing moon to spend

on recognizing everything and everyone alive and dead

as we are to the whole, every grain to the harvest

in the full siloes of our dark abundance, the source

that hides us out in the open from ourselves like stars

so we never have very far to look for the efflorescent fountainhead

of our evanescence, or the foundation stones under our feet

or what keeps us afloat like the lifeboat of a hand

when nothing else reaches out to us but the earth itself.

Learning wisdom is learning space. One mile east

is one mile west, my teacher said. Quantumly entangled thus,

we linger in the doorway of this available dimension

of the future in our house of life, like a palatial room

we’ve never entered before and the crucial hour come round

like a waterclock breaking from the womb, will

someone die in there, and we mourn our own demise,

or will someone be born of the metaphors we spread

like the seeds of wildflowers in the starfields

on the wind that issues like the breath of life and death

out of our own mouths and hearts and minds

as one of the most inspired ways yet the light turns around

removing the veils of endless night from its face

to look at itself, one earth, one third eye, one wild iris of life in space.

PATRICK WHITE