Eine Symphonie des Grauens, in Close-up Study

  I had read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and I had seen those images before — but not out in the open, outside of my head projected against a wall for everyone to share.

                  — Klaus Koblitz, after first viewing Nosferatu, from the novel Kino, by Jürgen Fauth

Still, the music plays though no one listens under the screen’s

great flicker — too taken, too caught up with the shock.  Nothing

could prepare — not the cellos’ deep groan at the bottom of bowing

violins moving in wave from the pit as if the world depended on

that rhythm for its turning, not the rumble of tympani giving order

to darkness, and not the seats’ tense shuffle of legs and feet.

Nothing could avert the look.

                                                                  Always the eyes.  After the beating

of horses’ hooves crossing the mountain pass, a hush troubles

the sounding clock and cut thumb from the table’s midnight meal.

Eyes just visible over wrinkled papers — such a strange,

lugubrious script. 

                                         We wait the creaking of an opened door — for

death itself under the archway, arms stretched tight beside the hips,

long fingers fanning out for some malevolent, unspeakable craving

— first oboe, then strings — for delirious surrenders of the body

to the will.

                         Shadows creep the tilted wall, banister, and bed —

both hands reaching, that rodent grin with its burning.  He rises

from the silent wood, climbs the ship’s hold with its wet smells

of turned earth, then walks the murky prow below block

and spar.  Rope dangles from the deck.  All fragments

of obsession and need to do the self in — while

wisps of smoke feather the moon’s

unbendable story to opiate fogs

of a stunned perfection.

Sam Rasnake