WHERE SOUND DID NOT LINGER

Last stand for her upon the thymele,

Tragedian's cry tears the air apart,

The stage denied its sacrificial torch.

A mournful mask bows low before the choir,

And ugly truth is chanted as a rite,

In garments dyed to counterfeit the fair.

Disastrous turns in Dionysus’ house,

Far past the reach of pity or of stay.

In Attic tragedy the herald waits;

Always he enters after blows are struck.

No gift of his can check the lifted blade;

His part is but to measure it and name.

True evil sleeps inside the words we trade;

The gods look on and rarely intervene.

Devoted long to Lovecraft’s fevered dreams,

For all her seasoned knowledge of their shapes,

Her vigilance took flight in hurried steps.

Perhaps a shriek broke from her and was lost;

At length she stiffen’d, frozen to the spot,

Knowing resistance labour’d, spent in vain.

When steel found tongue, the blood made haste to spill,

By a blind beast, quite mindless in its rage,

Not born, still present, nameless, ever near.

Hell crept along the lamplit paving-stones,

Muted, unappeased, and never truly tam’d.

The fog learned how to shape the voice I bore,

And breathed it out through lungs of poisoned gas.

The streets drew in and folded on themselves,

That I might pass between their walls unseen.

I was no monster yet, not fully wrought,

But something scarce complete, a moving hush,

A silence borrowing a body’s gait,

Rough-cut in outline, not yet hewn to form,

Treading the ways where sound did not linger.

The city slowly opened endless veins,

And pour’d its life out, trembling, into night.

Blade only followed where that dark will led;

The player left the boards and dropp’d his face.

The chorus filed out, obscure.