78

The Unaccustomed View

The real horror is never quite in view

(the accustomed view) but oblique:

the obscene, furtive crawl

along the edge of vision,

the perilous Something, big as a rat,

creeping behind you, waiting,

the deadly bright flick of motion

from just out of sight on your left—

and so you jerk up and look straight

at the dear safety of some small daily known

that comforts the shocked heartbeat.

Like the bright streetlamp sturdy there

and the nearer fir branch half hiding it, swaying,

ruffled by the wind

to a gentle pendulum of light and dark.

That the mind accepts.

But the body’s panic is not so easily hushed,

crowded as it is with racial memories.

Sleep fails tonight, and the small night noises,

the click and crack and groan of the dark house

rasp against adrenalin-honed nerves.

And then, sometimes, near dawn

recurs the remembering dream, the long-ago dream:

a tall fern forest under a white-hot moon,

and I (all four prehensile feet and whiskers and tiny snout)

creeping stealthily among tall grasses

heavy with seed;

and lurking somewhere, everpresent,

licking four rows of razors,

the cold reptilian musk that is death—

and that one fern quivered by the moon….