The Hart of the Wood

© tibor jantyikHowever good a day it is to be alive right now, just know there will come another day when it's equally good to die. You don't need a Crazy Horse to tell you that. 

There will come a storm. A war. And in war all our darknesses will converge, will meet. Too late, we might want to quarantine ourselves, remove our lusts and terrors from all equations, but that moment will have passed, and into the noxious bloodtide we must wade as ravenous, reluctant warriors, taking a reckoning of our friends and our enemies both, and giving deference equally, however much one is conveyed by the sacrament and the other by the sacrifice. For they are one and the same.

And this is what the crow saw.

Abandoned islands in a smokestack sky. Industrial archipelagoes. The molten stench of the world's innards. What gave us pause. What made us flinch. How many of us were built for this remorse? 

Who, who will comfort you now?

Hidden from most, a blister erupted in the forest, while men drew crude vaginas in the dirt and women built phalluses from mud. The crow flew closer, alighting on a cedar bough. Only the crow loved both venerated and venereal, gleaning correctly their kinship. Which is love, really. The crow has solved a great perplexity.

And now the coyote speaks.

But its language seems like gibberish, and its strange music makes men want to kill, so no one hears the coyote song. It goes:

"Weep now, but laugh hence,

Dream of yesterday while

Gutting the hart of the wood.

Kill your clenched prey, but

Return its offal to the thirsty earth,

And sing its worth to the skies."

If men heard the song, they might put down their dull blades for a while and make more and better vaginas in the dirt, or sharper blades. If women heard the song, they would perhaps add more verses and take solace in their propensity for avoiding foolishness in the unforgiving glare of the eternal public square. If children heard the song, the stitching of the world might even meet.

But instead, the crow mocks the coyote, and the coyote bows his defeated head while hot visceral gouts are splashed across the chalk downs of England, wakening the fox and the badger, only to begin the whole hemoclysm anew.

The fox barks till he's hoarse, then returns to the vixen in the den. Wash cycle becomes spin cycle, ad infinitum. They stand stock still and search each other's liquid eyes for some truth or even a hint of their next move. She tells him he should have been gone a long time ago, and he follows the arc of a comet in the black dome of the night, then stifles his abject caterwauling.

The crow laughs, although it feels more like whimpering. For a moment, it doubts even the sunrise, but at last spies a pale shimmer on the eastern rim of a sorrowing earth. Its cry is coarse in the quiet dawn, rough as the beard of a rapist on soft skin, and like a coward, stupidly, the crow looks only inward.

Ashamed, gauzy, reprehensible, engulfed, abhorrent, pensive, impure, tarnished, rapt, dishonorable.

Nothing but words. Words. Sounds as created by lips, throat, and tongue. Then scratched onto parchment with an ink-black quill. Repeated as tales or incantations. For what? Turns out the best we can say is this: 

Today is a good day to go fuck yourself.