. . .
To die and not be
noticed—
Or to feel you have
not been noticed!
Now exiled to another
existence, wherever!
Perhaps to an expanse
where you are hidden in a ripple of time!
She, Rosamund,
couldn’t say!
But no beings spoke
of man, or woman wherever she was—
A moment later, when
she became aware, the first days had already passed…
Days in silence.
A merciless silence,
in a land inhabited by stones and beings unknown.
This is how it was,
things sprang up, then disappeared—
‘One minute alive,
the next then dead!’
She told herself over
and over: ‘…one moment alive, the next dead...’
Nothing mattered:
eating, sleeping, talking, nothing at all mattered!
‘Someone is pouting!’
she whispered, ‘But where?’ she saw nobody.
Then she saw beings
with animal mouths.
Then she saw shadows,
everything shadows, shades, eclipses of beings.
Beings that appeared
to congeal, harden as they came more alive, as if using less energy…
Where from? Some window, in some unknown forward-dimension.
The fainted beings
increased, then they moaned, disappeared.
As time must have
passed, where time seems not to have existed, familiar as it was becoming, a
strange bond developed between them and her!
As if all were joined
together, in the same boat! Beyond their differences.
Was she still alive?
In a dream of
fatigue?
She stirred
imperceptibly, with this statement-question—!
Thus came a
somnambulistic moment, ‘I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming,’ she told herself.
She repeated this
over 100, no 1000, no 10,000 times, as then she stopped to take her inventory,
feeling strangely empty and venerable…
The Ground echoed.
This whole place was
of crumbling rock and sand, and in the distance was a faint path.
Vapor was rising
covering the path.
It was as if teasing her.
She figured if she
took it, it would lead to no place, to nothingness, no fork in the road, as
Robert Frost, once implanted in a poem.
Then she looked
beneath her knees, a clumsy hand had traced in the sand the inscription “You
must await trial, you must pay!”
It was as if an
invisible hand had reached all the way to her, alone.
#5096/ 2-28-2016
Copyright © by Dennis L. Siluk, Dr. h.c.
