WHEN GRIEF GROWS SAVAGE AND THERE'S NOTHING TO HUNT

WHEN GRIEF GROWS SAVAGE AND THERE’S NOTHING TO HUNT

When grief grows savage and there’s nothing to hunt

and all your mandalas are turning back into cave paintings

running down a limestone wall like spears

in the tears of weeping shamans, and you want

to tear your heart out and eat it to nourish your emptiness

but you’re not sure if it’s still the noble enemy it used to be,

or if the power of its sympathetic magic has past

the expiry date, and you think you might be

the last of the big mammals to go extinct in the ice-age,

time to sit down on the ground and have a good laugh

at how the things we take most seriously in life

make sacred clowns of us all in the last analysis

just before enlightenment. Put your lifemask on again,

coax a star or a firefly out of the tinder of that nebula

you’re blowing on until you’ve got a good blaze going

then throw all your grave goods on it as if

you were sending them on ahead of you

while you danced the pain away like the sky burial

of the ghost of another age that’s been haunting you

like a glacier that’s slowly beginning to wash itself clean of itself

as the numbness in your heart thaws like a baby mammoth

that fell into a crevasse of ice, and your fingertips

are melting like elk horn candelabra at a native exorcism.

And, yes, it stings for a while just as things are starting

to warm up, but that too will pass like a wet snowfall in April,

when your blood will begin to flow again

as if it were teaching the wild columbine and gypsy poppies

to waltz to the picture-music of the wind without banshees

howling and scratching at your eyes like dead branches

as if they were raking their fingernails against the glass

of a cold, crystal skull disappearing like an ice-cube in a night cap.

Sit down on the ground and have a good laugh

on the tab of everything that’s ever wounded you

and you just watch how easy it is to wipe

that gruesome grin off the face of the moon

like the sabre-toothed Smilodon that mauled you

and replace it with the smile of a Chesire cat

that just ate the canary in a coal mine of fossilized constellations

because grief can intensify the darkness into diamonds

that can see through the translucency of the tears in your eyes

new stars breaking out all over like waterlilies in the night skies

waiting for you to name them and give them myths of origin

derived like starmaps from the legends of your own shining.

Eventually the jesters of crazy wisdom will come to us all

and wipe the tears from our eyes and paint stars in their stead

we can point out to the cloaked ones

under the covers of their death beds

as if the deeper and darker the night the better to see

trillions of fireflies flung off the wheeling

of the celestial spheres like compassionate insights

into what we suffer for, what we lose whenever

we try to possess forever by trying to pour

the universe out of the universe like a waterclock in Aquarius

when we’re already swimming through eternity

like Pisces and there’s never a moment that passes in life

that isn’t a vernal equinox in a locket we hold close to our hearts

that doesn’t bloom in the fires of enlightenment

like star seeds hidden under the eyelids

of last year’s dolorous windfall of pine cones

because however the wind screams

through the broken wishbones and harps

of our shattered limbs, our torn dreams,

the eighth time we get up from our seventh time down

we get up and stand our ground like evergreens in the starfields.

PATRICK WHITE