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
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poem by Patrick White
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