Amber Burke
We’d just bought one of those Maine houses, you know the kind, right on the cliffside, gulf below, three rickety stories; the staircases seemed longer than the house was high and gave the impression that the top story was very far from the second, itself very far from the first. I thought I could write in that attic room where windows ran right down to the floor. Gray, jagged water filled each one.
“Don’t leave the window open. I don’t want to fall and die again,” said our son, looking out. He was three.
“Children say things like that,” said my equanimous wife, Nance, when I told her about it over wine and the boxes we were still unpacking.
“Nonsense or proof of reincarnation?” I asked.
We tried to think of anyone around here who had died from a plunge out a window into water; we could think of no one, and neither could Google, but I suppose there were plenty of people whose deaths didn’t make history. It annoyed me, the vanity of so many reincarnation hardliners—not only did they think themselves privy to the mechanics of the great hereafter, but they always claimed to have been kings or queens or Jim Morrison. Always someone famous, never one of these unknowns…
“Well, I was Cleopatra.” Nance had a way of saying things that made it hard to tell if she was kidding. “Who do you think you were?”
“A caveman.”
“You would be.”
I slept in my attic room that night, on my cot. Truthfully, I wanted to have been Shakespeare, or at least Whitman, but there was no indication that had been the case. My own writing did not show genius, or even promise, but there was so little of it that it was hard to say what it showed. Mostly, when I meant to be writing, I napped. We were living on what Nance made doing medical coding from home. But I was only thirty, had a son who said intriguingly peculiar things, a marriage that, even in its friction, possessed a real vitality, and hope of one day mustering the talent to write about these. I was eager for a future I could almost see.
Things have changed drastically.
I’ll tell you what I believe, then why I came to believe it.
Everyone who believes in reincarnation is wrong: it’s preincarnation. Why should things go one way? The dead go backwards through time like skipping stones. Our descendants are our antecedents. It is not that someone was Jim Morrison or Cleopatra, but that they will be. All of us are going that way, funneling backwards, and because of how the population has grown, some of the people in the past have to hold many.
Walt Whitman? He did contain multitudes. He will contain more.
Shakespeare? Who was he? Who wasn’t he? Who won’t he be?
Some of those who hold many future souls see more than the rest of us, and we call that genius. Some go crazy. Crazy is the wrong word. (I’m not a writer; I’ve accepted this.) I’m trying to say the strain becomes too much for some containers. Others are stronger. Many kings and queens have no difficulty being inhabited by realmsful of subjects at once; they already think in the plural and speak in royal “we”s. So they are good destinations on which to set our ships.
I like to think, if we direct our thoughts in the present toward a certain person in the past, we will be reborn as that person. If we imagine the weight of a scepter… if we listen to The Doors enough times…. if we focus hard enough, long enough, on Egypt… If we study poetry with enough commitment….
To situate so much hope in the herebefore is an act of radical optimism.
Or pessimism.
At four, our son died. Causes entirely natural. Heart defect. Then we had a girl. She died at two and a half. She fell from my window. So you see, we had been looking in the wrong direction to explain our son’s pronouncement. We were looking backwards when we should have been looking forward in time.
The window, it was closed, I tried to tell Nance, but not locked; it had one of those panes that teeter-totters open, as it did when our girl leaned her little back against it; she slid out, backwards, headfirst. I was right there, sleeping, just opening my eyelids when I saw her going through the window, just lunging from my cot when I heard the squeak of her skin on the glass, her grunt: a little sound of effort. Almost like she was taking a shit. I’m not trying to be irreverent; I hold onto that sound. It makes me think she wasn’t that scared. That she didn’t know what was happening. No other sound followed, at least none discernable from the usual sound of waves slapping rocks, to mark the moment she hit water.
Nance left me not long after. I know why; she looked at me and just saw the dead. We had been wronged. This was not supposed to be a time when a child died, let alone two. What had happened was more than a marriage could bear. But there would be better times—there had been. I explained everything.
“Get some help,” she said, squinting at me through eons, eyes lined darkly with grief.
I find myself without the head for poetry.
Far beyond the page, all pages, I see a great herebefore when there will be only a handful of us, the very first four, sitting together in a cave, our eyes gleaming in the light of a fire we made from embers of other fires; then, we will be so full of life and stories, full of all the life that ever was or will be, before we tumble backwards into the old, gray waves of eternity.
Amber Burke is a graduate of Yale and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars MFA Program. After working for ten years as an actress in New York and L.A., she now teaches writing and yoga at the University of New Mexico in Taos. Her creative work has been published in litmags including swamp pink, The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Superstition Review, okay donkey, and HAD. She’s also a regular contributor to Yoga International and Yoga Journal, which have published over 100 of her articles. You are welcome to see the work she has up at https://amberburke3.wixsite.com/amberburkewriting.
Photo by Strange Happenings on Unsplash