PAINTING NATIVE MASKS ALL DAY

PAINTING NATIVE MASKS ALL DAY

Painting native masks all day. Concrete.

Poured into a mould, their supple souls set

into the permafrost like a mammoth’s skull.

I don’t know what they were the gods of,

two of them. Could be a life or a deathmask.

Possibly Nootka, Salish, Kwakuitl, Chinook, Cowichan

Fossils, their faces, ferocious and threatening

though I doubt I’ve got the good sense to be scared.

Red for blood. Green for always. Black

for the night they were absorbed back into

like crows a moment in the moonrise, then gone

to some grove where they’ve driven the squirrels out

of their rookery. There but anyone’s guess where.

Terrorist hyperbole, or totems from darker realms,

one, perhaps, more human than the other,

an eagle shaman with a salmon moon in its talons

and the other, bucktoothed, like a nasty beaver,

but almost sacred clowns, as if they were designed

to scare the children like grandfathers

making monstrous faces without meaning

to make anyone cry. And I take it as a sign,

given the inconceivable atrocities of human obscenity

tearing at its own flesh in a high-minded rage of hatred

that threatened our own childhoods since these were made

to protect the innocent from their own nightmares.

Do ut abeas. I give so that you go away. A sign

that the nightmares have grown astronomically catastrophic,

and even though a hundred million people died

in the twentieth century, that’s still not enough

to satisfy the hearts of the generals, evicting

entire peoples and nations from the house

they were born into before they were driven

into an exile of violated thresholds and broken taboos.

I imagine them carved in rainproof cedar, red or yellow,

and just as a medicine wheel has to be blessed

by a real healer, so I wonder if the hands of those

who shaped these out of the uncarved block

of their heartwood ringed by halos of rain

were invisibly sanctified by the medium they worked in

as sometimes mine seem when a poem

circles overhead like an osprey for the pure joy of it,

or a painting suddenly breaks into life

in a limestone cave of hunting magic

that enchanted its prey in a trance

of holistic identification with the mystery,

not of how life takes life to survive,

but how life gives itself to itself like a gift

that thrives in the hands of those who do the giving

and multiplies the grazing herds of the stars

and rivers you can walk across like a messiah

on the backs of fish, without overextending

your supply line the way Napoleon and the Nazis did

when they tried to live off the land

by treating the people like retreating buffalo

or realizing, a nemesis too late, you can only keep,

conqueror or not, what you’re willing to give away

with an open hand. And the rest is just a map of smoke

on the Road of Ghosts, beaten armies

dragging their weapons behind them

like their mythically-deflated ambitions,

wishing they’d defended their pre-emptive ideas

with tools instead of rifles, a paintbrush or a knife

to fashion their own unlikeness into the divinity

of a lifemask you could wear among the gods

without losing face as a human that you haven’t learned by now

when you reach Moscow, this way, self-destruction,

that way the pathless path, the gateless gate

to the old growth totem poles of creation

collaborating imaginatively in their own interpretation.

PATRICK WHITE