Dreams In A Backwater: Part One, I, (5)

(5)

I decided last night, well past midnight, to go for a walk in the cemetery. Why? I don't really know. Perhaps I just wanted to see with fresh eyes a place that had grown too familiar to my sight. Perhaps I thought that wandering through a graveyard after dark would allow me to test my bravery, to confront the ghouls and bogeymen, the zombies and vampires, that haunt my superstitious mind. I can't really say.

It was fairly light out, which was odd since the moon is in its last quarter. The sky was clouded over but lit up with a bright, pinkish-grey glow. Down below, the cemetery stones looked mere heaps of darkness, blacker than shadows; but the winter trees as they reared up against the bright sky made sharp, jagged shapes that seemed weird, and awful – but beautiful as well: it was as if they embodied some fiercely anguished, yet wholly silent struggle. I confess that the sight of them, combined with the silence of the night and the eerie radiance of the sky, both thrilled and chilled me. The nearness of the dead as I walked among them during this, their most private hour, excited me enormously: I was at once enthralled and appalled by my own sense of daring. I felt I had trespassed into a forbidden land.

Then I began to feel as I imagine animals must feel – alert but unknowing, ready to bolt at the first sign of danger. To shake off my mood I tried to see this landscape not as strange, nor as beautiful, but for just what it was; still, it felt to me as if I were passing through the vague and shifting transports of a dream. And yet it was a true dream! I sensed the earth beneath me, a hard, compact globe, crushing in upon itself – a ball of soil and stone and molten rock crushed together by an immense internal contraction of force. And out of the core of this contraction I felt an energy emanating – a torrential river of energy, born out of nothingness really, but endlessly pushing itself outward and upward. It pushed out through the earth, as it were, like living thought, to splash itself against the vast expanses of air and space and sky. I felt then, walking through that field of the dead, as if I knew for the first time truly what gods were, and – being born of that same torrent of energy and out of that same vast receptacle, though twisted into human form – what I myself am.

* * *

NURSERY RHYME

Nature is our mother
Our father was a god
And misbegotten children we
Forever homeless are

* * *

NIGHT BRUISES

Night bruises and buries me.
And still it is more tender
than you were, or ever meant to be.
How could I possibly ever explain
the brutal pleasure that we took
in causing each other pain?
I guess suffering is all that man
was ever really made for; and woman, well,
I guess that she's where suffering began.
Pale as moonlight, my naked skin
upon this narrow bed. A softening of fire,
the child that grows within:
it's all that we were, more than we meant to be.
You are not here. I hope you're dead.
Night bruises and buries me.

* * *

LOST

The world tilts upward towards a slanty light,
Its chill rays piercing his naked skin
Like laughter, laughter breaking through the bony shield
To reveal an apple bitten, and the constant throb
Of its red apology.
He lies in his bed, cursing
Her, tossing and turning, a restless ghost
Still haunting a dream.
Hadn't he swallowed the moon and not made a sound?
Written letters as big as the ocean?
The sun rises, hot as a fist.
Now it's the birds' argument, it's everyone's a fish,
It's the tower of Babel, the flood, and all the rest.
Rocking inside that raucous music,
He remembers when he thought he was something better
Than a mere crash.
But the tears kept falling, like rain, like stars,
Like any myth; and he'd always supposed his
Were no more false than true.

Now he turns to the wall with a panting sound.
He looks at himself through a telescope turned round:
But even to such a god as this,
He's a firefly lost in embankments of fog.