A VISION OF GRIEF IN THE WORLD

A VISION OF GRIEF IN THE WORLD

A vision of grief in the world, so vast and varied,

so intimately specific, so peculiar to each one of us,

we stratify it in our brains like the fossil shapes

of wavelengths and membranes layered

like the flying carpets of the Burgess Shale

or the sediment of a mindstream slowing down

to deposit itself in the book of experience.

Things we couldn’t understand at the time

and still don’t, turmoils of stardust

that fogged our clarity up like a windshield

and taught the heart that feeling

cannot only be a chandelier but a chainsaw

in an old growth forest as well

no matter how many nails for the best of reasons

you drive into the messiah you’re trying to save.

We’re always pouring mirages into

the white gold goblets of the moon

and confusing our lunancy

with the hilarity of being drunk enough

to delude us into thinking we’ve escaped our sorrow

by covering our eyes to outrun the light.

Sometimes I can look at a housefly missing one wing,

rowing in circles on its back on a windowsill,

and my heart overwhelms me with a flashflood of tears

rising from an unknown watershed deep inside,

a subliminal empathy for everything that is lost,

broken, and alone, seriously alone, when

they turn the lights out in the labyrinth for the night,

and the wounded lab rats settle down

in the corners of their cages with their backs

up against the wall, until tommorow when

the lights go on again like a Pavlovian dawn,

and the savage humans come with their tormentive deaths

to kill the way they kill each other

with expedience and enlightened self interest

that whisper like contractors in the shadows

of pleonastic alibis for perpetual war against the world.

No less susceptible than I have been all along

to what is emerging like a dark harmony from my confusion,

my well-informed bafflement, this road I’ve been walking

like a revolution on crutches ever since we lost,

as if there were no other way but love and understanding

even when you’re ready, six times a day

to concede defeat without giving your assent

to the way chaos turned out in retrospect. Time

sweetens the apple into an approximately habitable planet

even if it’s not Eden, and peace beguiles the soul

like someone left alone too long to the intimacy of their solitude

but the sadness of a seasoned overview mingles

in the sugars of life as well, and the heart, the heart

hangs heavily in space with no sight of a planet

under its feet anymore, except the abyss of it all

with nothing to fall toward or away from anymore.

A black sheep shepherd moon with nowhere to pasture

in the starfields on the back slopes of the world mountain,

with nothing to graze on but the symbols

that swarm its breakthrough into the available dimensions

of a future that can’t happen a while longer without it.

Human nature, an alloy of the highest and the lowest,

a three-edged sword, drawn like iron and blood out of the ore,

folded and hammered on the anvils of the stars

and tempered in the valleys of the fireflies

where cooler heads prevail, or the nib

of a silver plough farming the dark side of the moon

as if it were seeding sacred syllables in its wake

hoping they would spread like the hermetic lunacy

of tryng to make bread to share with those who hunger,

out of wildflowers. I was born with a bellyful of those

who try to make what people need seem as beautiful

as the gaping aviomantic fountainmouths they never feed.

Michelangelo at Sotheby’s, Shakespeare at the Bodleian,

how many families could culture sustain

if it actually got as real as grain in their bloodstreams,

instead of auctioning off the windows

as if Galileo painted something as obscene

upon the corrective lenses of his Dutch telescope

as pockmarks on the moon and sunspots on perfections

as one cardinal suggested he did

instead of looking as far as any of these three

into what is well beyond any of us to comprehend and forgive

insomuch if it’s done unto these,

it’s done unto the rest of us as well?

We should worry about a lot more than just cholesterol

placking the heart at its tinkling soirees

suggestively pointing out the gestures

of meaningful insignificance that beset our labours.

We should check out, to maintain our own well being,

whether our art has a green thumb or not,

or we’re just leaving

the crumbs of our dreams in the corners

of other people’s eyes to nibble their way

out of a dark wood into the threshed gardens

and empty silos that ring as hollow as a carillon of bells

summoning a sad, sad seance to leave ghost food out for the dead.

PATRICK WHITE