Nathan Hassall - Perhaps it is Grief

Trancelike, Nathan Hassall’s “Perhaps it is Grief” delves both inward and outward as it examines death and loss, the interplay between love and endings. “Perhaps it is Grief” could be thought of as a poem about death, about what we’re left with in the absence of something we loved, but it is nonetheless alive in its lush spontaneity and intention, in the universal interconnectedness of all things. “Perhaps it is Grief’ is a poem to read again and again, discovering something new each time.

Perhaps it is Grief

Aeon: A period of immeasurable
duration. And a ladle scoop from the guts
of a neutron star, an unfathomable

weight.

How God snake-wraps his index finger
and wrings my heart into a river; his essence
charming the body into burning spirals
which crackle into oneness with the

gold

in the sky. Perhaps it is grief that has a mass
which leaks and shudders through earth,
walls, skin—the porous world
of maps, mudslides, transient margins
of holy texts that contain and release as a

flower

from its bud. Each of us: fevered bodies,
spines pressed against wrinkled bedsheets
into a mattress of outer skin that swims
in the cellular fluids of composition
and decomposition.

Time

hammers its wave from inside,
shatters the chest plate into its constituents—
calcium, collagen—then hauls its thick

tide

through ligaments. We try to put this out of mind,
how our failed temples creak and bend, loosen
their threads, and fling their gates open
for shadowed figures to enter and

dance

on the courtyard as we cave into ruins. This temenos:
where rainwater fills the moats. Our bodies excrete, seep,
leak, and receive the elements
as an offering. The membrane goops between

bodies

bodies beyond bodies, unable to escape
spirits that shrink and warp and croak
through our wounds into forms. Or when through

love—

that which cannot
be measured—

ends.

We splay open on a cliff edge, hungering bone slathered
to aching flesh, inhaling remnants of sea foam
into our seaweed lungs. We slither down
the cliff into earth’s dark gullet, scrape through blades
of coral, then burrow deep into her flaring

core.

As the flames grind us to ash,
the universe, which began
in music, will finish its song
to the redeemable. And we
will gurgle along.

I was, I will be,

I am,
I am.

***

Note: the word ‘Aeon’ described as “A period of immeasurable duration” is quoted from The Century Dictionary.

Nathan Hassall

Nathan Hassall believes in poetry’s transformational potential. He weaves dreams, altered states, numinous experiences, and the natural world into his work. Hassall’s poems have appeared in Arteidolia, Ghost City Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, La Piccioletta Barca, The Inflectionist Review, and more. He currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Malibu, California. Find out more and sign up to his poetry mailing list at www.nathanhassall.com/signup. You can also sign up to his poetry YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@nathanhassallpoetry.