A GREAT GREY FANTASY
By Lewis Turco
No need to wound
the pride of witches
with dental pumpkins and
cardboard toots one autumnal
eve each year. Why raise the wrath
of wraiths; why rile
the local spook
or banshee? Let them lie there
sucking the blood of dreams.
You stay indoors. If
your id needs its lid lifted, flick
a knob in your parlor. You’ll
hear electronic chains scrape
and rattle, see
shadows larrup
the Laramie trail and Mike
Hammer’s image pound dickens
out of rubber jaws. The
Great Gray Phantom rides
again. Or, I
should say, still: Halloween has
been perpetuual now
for several years.
I have been here
in my easy chair
a month myself, bewitched
(i.e., made stone) by the runes
incanted by fakirs
of Commerce,
greatest of nether lords.
Come, I’m bloodless and it’s what!
Halloween? October
already? Out, then,
out of coffins;
out on the porch for air,
zombies! The moon’s full. Sniff.
What’s that wail, werewolves?
No, that window,
and that one, look there,
everywhere one notes tubes
flickering, faces pasted
to squares of grey
glass and gas. The sound!
it’s weird: hooves (cloven?), shots,
songs, shrieks (this Is Your Life) — what
a devilish din. What
are those black masses
against the moon?
Whither bound? Gad, brooms! Goblins,
ghosts, wizards, ogres! What’s
that banner say? “MARS
OR BUST!” In I
go for a good view.
a Mobile Camera
Rocket’s up ahead of them.
Poem from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, xx:1, Jan. 1960, pp. 98-99. All rights reserved by Lewis Turco.
Image by Tomie di Paola, Copyright and all rights reserved by Tomie Di Paola, 2013.
The Door
By Thom. Seawell
Have you ever walked into a room with some purpose in mind, only to forget completely what that purpose was?
Apparently the doors themselves are to blame for these strange memory lapses. Psychologists at the University of Notre Dame have discovered that passing through a doorway triggers what's known as an “event boundary” in the mind, separating one set of thoughts and memories from the next. One’s brain files away the thoughts one had in the previous room and prepares a blank slate for the new locale.
Thank goodness for studies like this -- It's not age that causdes such lapses, it's that damned door!
THE DOOR
On a sculpture by Ivan Albright
There is a door
made of faces
faces snakes and green moss
which to enter is
death or perhaps
life which to touch is
to sense beyond the
figures carved in
shades of flesh and emerald
the Inhabitant at home
in his dark
rooms his hours shadowed or
lamptouched and that door
must not be
attempted the moss disturbed nor
the coiling lichen approached
because once opened
the visitor must remain in
that place among the
Inhabitant's couches and
violets must be that man
in his house cohabiting
with the dark
wife her daughter or both.
By Lewis Turco
From The Inhabitant, Poems by Lewis Turco, Prints by Thom. Seawell, Northampton: Despa Press, 1970. Out of print, but all poems from the series are collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007.
October 09, 2013 in Art, Books, Commentary, Poems, Prints, Prose poems | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: memory lapses