The Fear of Nothing

                

She tries to read now, murmuring, muttering.

“Yes, those children who sang were in prison,

they were not in school, and the light wasn’t right.”

Today she will talk to the voices.  ......................

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The Fear Of Nothing

I could see her yellow fear

—the worst fear: that of Nothing.

And I felt the pulsing, the pulsing.

and I saw through her eyes,

the wheat fields flaming away

to purple expirations, the Darkland.

And via her eyes: a bright burst in her head.

A child, happy as hell:

And then the evening quietly died...

And I listened in. I heard

the thud, the thud the thud: and the pump the pump of blood

pushing darkness through -

And the foreign songs: “Ich ach eich Zeibeit.”

(it sounded like) and she imagined

the children, massed, and trapped in cities of electric wire, singing:

But it all going faster, and more and more madly.

And I saw –

I saw the flares, the grins, the lights –

the blood waves: the Dark Ones, the click of guns;

and people turning inside out:

but, I swear - she was beautiful.

At once the many mad heads

pushed up into different dells

in the middle of the night

by the body of the One in the nightmare dead.

I see her, and I see her not —

her enlightened eyes, her smile,

her creatureness: her soft, soft,

 - and gently sexual beauty:

Outshining eyes, bright bright -

white and perfect as cathedrals her teeth.

White beyond white returning light.

Her youth her hope her pride,

the plum gloss flush

dark on her cheek, luminous, like

that face on a fine-webbed canvass,

made glow to lumen by love of artist:

Red yellow brown brush touch,

a God-fragment, gold, and startling as West-low –

Sudden as your car turning to down sun.

(Eyes blind blazed dazzled dazed.)…

And her litheness: leapflow onto graceflow,

alluring, cat-deft, cat-quick, cat-leap

of her gymning smooth...

…as a clever egg might roll over and over - and down a smooth.

She, all ‘shes’, waiting:

Bright eyes lusting all ‘bes’.

Just eighteen, so quick, so excited about it all —

But no.

A dark dead grey dread something

turned over to show its body’s face:   

to stare and stare from red mad eyes.       

Those lamps of black gone black mis-shaped -

and as evil as hooked wood… rolled,

up-rolled eyes: the whites now green, now cyan,

now red….

And like a low, unstoppable tap, tap, tap

dripping kill-drops, or the infinity

of a wasp needle, pressing in, injecting –

like the Icheneunon Wasp into wood grub larvae –

Green paralysis, in.  In. Yes –

Rolled from somewhere this Coldness to stare and stare:

Some ghastly grisling thing, into her.

Yes, yes, the Strange began,

the Yellow began, the Chill began:

And the Faces, leering, of all the Ever Dead,

(Thank you Mr. War): and the forests

of hair on a planet head –

that shifted down, and all she could see

was the Great Curve of Mars —

and the clunky clunk round round up down of the ever spinning blurr:

The merry-go-round of madness.

the red spot, the yellow spot,

and the Night, growing in her eyes -

and the distant laughter: like the booming

of a hammer on hollow steel.

And the flashings, the faces, the waking to eyes in a head from which

the doctors had extracted the brain...

Yes, it took many years. Gone. (Gone).

Grey, multi-wrinkled, shriveled, like

a sucked fruit, and drugged, and drooped,

and nodding —

She tries to read now, murmuring, muttering.

“Yes, those children who sang were in prison,

they were not in school, and the light wasn’t right.”

Today she will talk to the voices.

She, who only read of Auschwitz,

listens to GerFrench nonsense,

and wanders from the yellow waves

into the dark tunnels of the nerves,

which, multi-branched, are hers.

She fades, dies out, flick!

I did not know her

or meet her,

but I see her, and I listen, and I look -

- and in this dance of death - I hear her.

R. Taylor.