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These places, I am describing the second homes of
Cthulhu,
lie high over the flatlands which hang
high over the valleys
in which still continue the fierce ceremonies
of breeding and feasting
and blooding the lurchers
on strangers
the choice of the god as sent for the purpose the
Irishman
Patrick Bronte having his kids speak from
under a mask:
"I told them all to stand back and
speak boldly from under cover,
of the mask (to gain my end)" (ie to trick tease
out
ascertain the hidden character of the terrifyingly
bright terrifyingly ill
coming
out of the mouldy woodwork of his hilltop walls)
in another year or the same Ellen Nussey said of
Charlotte at school "she brought out, in almost cloud-height,
her somnambulist, walking on shaking turrets"
the same Charlotte a much later year somewhere
else in the same country wrote down a dream of her
older sisters alive again:
"THEY
HAD CHANGED: THEY HAD FORGOTTEN WHAT THEY USED
TO CARE FOR. They were
very fashionably dressed, and began criticizing the
room etc."
and in the pub in the town drinking
to provide conversation
Branwell was akaed Patrick
in the village Patrick II his
decision or a joke against his father or the Son
and
over the tops the earthworks lie focusing the cross
which is
more megalith than earthwork Churn Milk
Joan
turned stone to teach her
to enjoy living
in
a place not made for that by a maker against that marks
where
unequally nine tracks join and on the page that moulds
with time
"dead dreams of an elder world and
mightier race
lay frozen in their wide
gaping eyeholes" wrote Charlotte of her lover
of
her landscape in 'La Villette'
the corpses of his lambs the sacrificial
snowcaught
crowpecked
the ones that lived his name
are reborn again when winter yields to spring
and takes in sulk the blanket home
that hid the
long months every
good and bad thing laid soft-heavy on
till it
revert to bone
and so the sisters laid
like snowsheets over tops
blacklined with tops
of fieldstone walls
their books to hide the dying
everlasting flesh-coloured-dartcase obscene
tentacles
of the Father yet still under storm of wind they
move
hungry billowing to gravehumps they refill
high
delvers'
empty ground
masks donned only to
reveal our absence of true
meaning
wittering all the long way
up and down and in
between
no famous god's consumption
visits us with
genius
through eyehole cracks
in peat and stone
holes golfed over
with an aim of victory
over
all this view short term as over abused children
the while invisible the dark god decked in acid rain
scabs peat scabs sheep scabs without end
our whole
excuse for being
alive without
eternal reshaping
power of
gorging suffering
(c) Steve Sneyd 1990
First
published as House of Moonlight Poetry Leaflet 10
This poem was also reprinted
in the collection In
Coils of Earthen Hold (University
of Salzburg, 1993)
Go to Meet the Authors:
Steve Sneyd
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