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
