Descent

Descent

We moderns are not good at descent.

Grief is a descent.

We want to go upward
outward
worship skygods.

Build rocketships
and colonize Mars.

Grief has a downward motion.
It hollows us out.
Makes our spines bow
until the belly becomes a bowl,
so we can gather
there
beneath
where we customarily
identify as self.

Grief anchors us
to the viscera.

We want thoughts
and prayers that rise
ethereally
to the celestial

But grief–
her intuitions come
with our nose pressed
to a crack in the earth

from which some
deeper older exhalation,
pythian perhaps,
exudes.

Grief,
like all elemental
motions,
all attributes of love,
is hosted by the body.

Our body wears
her,
could be adorned
by the earth-based
knowings
she gifts us,
deepening through
our footpads back
into soil
and the knowing we
are home
in the animal, vegetal, and mineral realms.

Grief could
give us beautiful
gestures of mourning.
Abilities to allow
tears to flow through.
Make us like rivers.
To our people.

Grief could make us like fire.
Burned to the ground,
immolated by her immensity.
She could make us
into pheonixes,
if we let her.

Grief could be a purification.
A kind of moisturizer
for the spirit,
if we rubbed her
on our bodies
with reverence.

Alternatively,
denied,
for those who
refuse to acknowledge
the collapse wing of creation

Grief could,
exiled,
adorn us with madness.
Adorn us with suicide,
adorn us with matricide,
adorn us with homicide.

This might look like
the proliferation of opiates
and firearms.
This might look like
knees on necks.
This might look like
the Amazon rainforest burning.

This might look like some
of today's authoritarian
leaders.

What if there was a camera
that could photograph their exiled grief?

Instead of merely Putin,
Trump, Bolsonaro, Xinping,
we saw their ghostly
disembodied grief doppelgangers?

Cooperative societies
welcome the stranger,
but, we,
the moderns,
were birthed with the formalized
exile of the Other.

We take all the darker,
wilder parts of ourselves
and place them outside
the circle of our self-knowing.

You know what I'm talking about–
we are storytelling creatures all,
the colonial enterprise wasn't merely political,
but a psychic colonization.

Enslaving the dark bodies,
subduing the Indigenous bodies,
was the subduing of the wild unknown in ourselves.

Was the banishment and sterilization
of the sovereign in each of us.

And yet, these ejected parts,
still they twin us,
unknown,
the invisible gravitational forces
twisting our yearnings into deathwishes,
for beings split off from
their deeper intuitions
cannot but hasten death.

We call it dark matter
in physics
(these inexplicable twins).
What are they made of?

Exiled grief.

If we confessed that as a culture,
our current motions of response
to pain–
numbness on one hand (opiates)
fighting on the other (firearms)
were inadequate to the purpose of mending our hearts,
what would we do?

We would humbly apprentice to grief.
We would ask for her assistance to make us whole.

To do this, we would have to let her back into the house.

And as she took our hands in her own,
we would find ourselves descending,
and we would need to allow this.

We would need a community to do this with.

And we would need to unstory our thinking that we know where she is taking us,
for as foreign as it feels,
it is in the direction of home.