in the dark style of Poe
In Elmira’s clutch where the valley bends,
And fog descends like unconfessed sins,
The wind bears low, cathedral tones -
A psalm for marrow under stones.
On Lincoln Street, I once did dwell;
But something stayed that knew me well.
The snow there tasted of iron and sleep,
Its flakes fell slow, as if to weep -
Each one a tongue of frozen prayer
That blessed the ground, but not the air.
The porch still groaned a mournful hymn,
And steps came down that were not him.
The attic breathed - not rat nor rain,
But something listening through the grain.
A scent like wax and blistered skin
Seeped through the walls and settled in.
And in my mother’s mirror’s face,
No child returned to take my place.
At first, I called it grief, or frost -
The aftertaste of all we’d lost.
But when I left, it followed near,
A fog that thickened year by year.
It learned my walk, it shaped my sigh,
It borrowed sound, it borrowed sky.
Now in a newer, whiter street,
With modern locks and polished heat,
I wake to find beneath the floor
That breath again - its pulse, its core.
Not dream. Not pipe. Not faulty seam.
But something older than a dream.
It hums in drains, it sleeps in wire,
It feeds on dust, it drinks the fire.
It dreams with me - its heart my own,
Our pulses tuned to undertone.
I see its eyes when curtains move -
My gaze becomes the thing I prove.
It whispered first from Lincoln Street,
And now it murmurs, incomplete.
It wore my childhood like a skin,
And waits for me to crawl within.
It does not want my death, but less -
The hollow left by loneliness.
So if you walk through Elmira rain,
And smell of rust, of grief, of grain -
Don’t call my name, don’t meet my stare;
The fog remembers who stood there.
And what it keeps, it keeps to stay -
For leaving is its only way.
GBS
2003
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