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
