Here it is then, the dark thing,
the dark thing you have waited for so long.
You have made such melodramas.
You thought it would carry its own mist,
obscuring you in a damp enfolding, like the mildew
shroud on bread. Or you thought it would hide
in your closet, among the clothes you outgrew years ago,
nesting in dustballs and fallen hair, shedding
one of your fabricated skins
after another and growing bigger,
honing its teeth on your discarded
cloth lives, and then it would pounce
from the inside out, and your heart
would be filled with roaring
or else it would come swiftly and without sound,
but with one pitiless glaring eye, like a high-speed train,
and a single blow on the head and then blackout.
Instead it is strangely like home.
Like your own home, fifty years ago,
in December, in the early evening
when the indoor light changed, from clear to clouded,
a clouded thick yellow, like a sulphury eggyolk,
and the reading lamp was turned on
with its brown silk shade, its aroma
of hot copper, the living
room flickering in the smells of cooking dinner,
and you crouched on the hardwood floor, smudged
eblows
and scaly winter knees on the funny papers,
listening to the radio, news of disasters
that made you feel safe,
like the voice of your mother
urging you yet again to set the table
you are doing your best to ignore,
and you realized for the first time
in your life that you would be old
some day, you would some day be
as old as you are now,
and the home you were reading the funnies in
by the thick yellow light, would be gone
with all the people in it, even you,
even you in your young, smudgy body
with its scent of newsprint and dirty
knees and washed cotton,
and you would have a different body
by then, an old murky one,
a stranger's body you could not even imagine,
and you would be lost and alone.
And now it is now
and the dark thing is here,
and after all it is nothing new;
it is only a memory, after all:
a memory of a fear,
a yellowing paper child's fear
you have long since forgotten
and that has now come true.
