On a night like any other night, in the house
of our life, foursquare and shining,
I read you the story of life everlasting,
a family in a time before our time,
traveling, where are they traveling to?
The wheels of their wagon turn as the world
turns because the world’s a wheel, too,
and then the wheel slows down and stops
in the middle of a summer day hot enough
on a city sidewalk to fry an egg, except
there are no sidewalks here, only a pathless path
leading them, where does it lead to?
As through a telescope, far things seem near,
and near things close enough to touch.
We are, you and I, onlookers to a tale
where the curse will seem, at first, a gift
impossible to live with, impossible not to,
as a mother, a father, and a boy enter
a wood where trees sieve light to shadow,
and creatures stir and live without a thought
to death, the way, too briefly, Adam lived with Eve.
A giant ash presides there, its silver leaves
raised in silent benediction to the air,
while gnarled roots below are splayed
like the fingers of an ancient grasping hand
outspread upon the globe. A spring flows
round the roots, inviting them to drink.
How cold the water looks. How clear.
They drink deep draughts but don’t know
what they drink, enchanted water from a world
that lies underneath or side by side the one
we’re in, flowing, flowing from Creation’s
other side where all things live forever
in a garden rounded on all sides and bounded
by a wall that keeps out death and change.
Yes. Paradise. A plan that failed.
Creepers grow up the outside walls, attracted to
a brightness within that never wavers, never dies.

O waters of life! Eternal flowing waters!
Expelled from the world of time, our travelers
must wander now in a world where years flow
like a river around them, leaving them untouched.
They stay as they are, never a wrinkle or gray hair,
their clothes a perfect fit but threadbare.
Imagine their life as a line that starts somewhere,
the pencil held by an unseen hand that moves it
round and round the globe without a pause,
the pencil growing dull, the freighted sunrise,
seen for the ten-ten-thousandth time, too much
like yesterday’s, tomorrow’s, the stars without surprise,
each plate of food the same, the same, the same.

But all stories end in death, even this one,
because the boy falls in love with a girl, mortal
as we are, and gives her all he has to give:
he takes her to the spring and offers her the water.
She kneels, she cups her hands, as if …
We are deep in the story, too far in to turn back,
when you stop me with a cry—
“Mother, promise never to die!”
And with your words, death enters the picture,
and you refuse it, just as I did when I was five
and begged my mother for the cup, the pill
that would stop all change and keep me
as I was: a child with a store of endless days,
being read to in a bright room, no way
for death to intrude. How little I knew.
I was a child who would have drunk the cup.

But the girl at the spring, what does she choose?
She chooses change, a contract with the dead,
and in the moment of her choosing, her childhood
disappears, she sees on the forking path ahead,
leafstrewn and windswept, strangers waiting
for her to catch up: a husband and a child,
her repetition, and beyond, the daughters
of her daughter, mere shadows to her now.
Who are these strangers but the dead come back?
She has made her choice but keeps the water anyway,
tightly stoppered in a vial, hidden away,
only she knows where, to take out and wonder at.
Sometimes alone she holds it to the light
and sees in the clear suspension that other life,
the one she didn’t choose: a bright patchwork
of hill, field, and tree, gone now, to make way
for the town, and a boy tugging at her hand,
the two of them immortal as the sun.
Years pass, each one more quickly, until
she doubts her choice, if she was wise.
She keeps her sorrow private, as most sorrows are,
her thoughts wound tightly round themselves,
the way a thread is wound upon a spool.
The world’s too terrible to live in!
I hate the world! she thinks. And goes on.
The world is shadowed and shining. Complete.
And torn. The bright drops in the vial cloud over,
her eyes are cloudy too, as she dies the death
we all die, having completed herself in time.

How late it is. You have fallen asleep,
safe in the words of a story that isn’t safe at all.
I close the book, turn the light out, and leave
the door ajar. Tomorrow will you ask me
how the story ended? Or think you dreamed a dream,
strange and unsettling, the way dreams are?
What words complete a tale that ends in death for us all?

The boy returns a lifetime later, believing
he’ll find her in the wood, just as she was,
just as he is now. She kept the water, after all.
She might have changed her mind.
He sees her apparition standing by the ash,
holding a hand out to him, warm, alive—
And touches instead
cold stone, her name freshly engraved, her dates
enclosed in parentheses. No, it’s all wrong.
He returns. He is free in a way we cannot imagine.
And perfectly alone. He sees her stone
and wonders again what made her choose against him.
And she, like Eve in death, a spectral presence,
begins to sing, her song rising above the world’s
flat hum to move the trees, the stars, and pull him
backward to a wood that isn’t there, a spring
where he drank of Time, unknowing, ignorant:
O mortals, do not drink the waters!
All is in flux. All is shining.
The world is spread before you like a table, heavy and laden.
Milk must be poured into mugs and drunk down in great gulps,
and buttered toast heaped onto plates.
The pond is waiting to be rowed on.
The apple tree, with its reaching arms, wants to be climbed.
The fruit on the topmost branch must be taken in hand and eaten.
The swing, still in the early morning, must be swung on.
The dog must have its stick, its ball, even as the mockingbird
waits in shadow, waits to mock us all. Listen.
The tongues of bells are ringing in the sun
as we climb the bright hill, pause, and go back down.
Each thing is as it does. The world’s a wheel.
And death flashes out at us, makes the world shine.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

These are her words. Our only paradise is here,
and we are rich as misers, rich in change!
We hold in our empty hands a currency of days
that we must spend down to the very last,
no holding back allowed. But sleep now.
And I’ll sleep, too, to wake with you,
wake to the everlasting present of our life.

—Elizabeth Spires