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(5)
I decided last night, well past midnight, to go for a walk in the
cemetery. Why I decided to do this I'm not really sure.
Perhaps, having seen the place so often by daylight, it had come to
seem to me a little too familiar, too pedestrian a sight; going there
after dark would mix things up a bit, allow me to see it with fresh
eyes. Partly I think I wanted to see if I could confront the
ghouls and bogeymen, the zombies and vampires, that still haunt my
superstitious mind. I'm as subject to such childish fears as
anyone, and have often wondered if I'd have sufficient bravery to
test myself against them, were I to try. Also I suppose I felt
that if I am indeed – as I often feel myself to be – a
stranger in this world, then I might just as well court strangeness
and see where it leads.
It was fairly light out, which was odd, the moon being in its last
quarter. The sky was clouded over, yet lit up with a bright,
pinkish-gray glow. The winter trees as they reared up against
this sky made sharp, jagged shapes that looked weirdly contorted,
grotesquely twisted and bent, yet oddly beautiful as well: to
me it seemed 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 emanating from
the sky, both thrilled and chilled me. The gravestones were
mere heaps in the darkness, blacker than shadows, and the nearness of
the dead as I walked among them during this, their most private hour,
gave me the feeling that I had trespassed into a forbidden land.
I was at once enthralled and appalled by my own sense of daring.
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 just as 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. 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 what gods
are, and – being born of that same torrent of energy and out of
that same vast receptacle, but twisted into human form – what
I myself am.
NURSERY RHYME
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Nature is our mother
Our father was a god
And misbegotten children we
Forever homeless are |
NIGHT BRUISES
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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 so much 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, and more than we meant to be.
You are not here. I hope you're dead.
Night bruises and buries me. |
LOST
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The world tilts upward towards a slanty light,
Its chill rays piercing his naked skin
Like laughter, breaking through the bony shield
To reveal an apple bitten, and the constant throb
Of its white 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.
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