Isolating Myself

 

Do I want breakfast?  Was I just pacing, or did I walk in here for raisins?  They were forgotten, as the flour was forgotten.1 Pecans on the pantry shelves.  I feel strange.2  Maybe I’d have more energy if I could hike a canyon trail in the shadow of fluttering leaves, but I don’t have the energy.  Breezes shake the puddle, rewording every line it quotes.  A robin chirps in the serviceberry bush, repeating three slurred notes.3  Sleep, my child, and fever all through the night4.  That line’s not right.5  Skunks in the yard.  I say I flee them in terror, and people don’t see it’s half a joke.  No offense in the world,6 to themselves or to us.  C. S. Lewis didn’t know how right he was—Original Sin is shit.7  Have to remember that.  Have to lie down and see if I can get to sleep.  The room is gray as underwater.  My head is too far from my shoulders, the ceiling has the wrong dimensions.  My phone’s flashes make faint halos on it.  Dim reflections and diminuendos...8  R’lyeh!9  R’lyeh!  A thousand deaths were not enough for R’lyeh!10  I can’t think of how to use it if I keep repeating it in my high-pressure head as I’m pacing about the room again.11  Good thing no one’s here thinking they’re taking care of me.  I have everything I need.  Soon I’ll find my raisins.

​

1. Sara Teasdale, "Let it be Forgotten"

 

"Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten"

​

2. Rita Dove, "Best Western Motor Lodge, AAA Approved"

 

"I tell you, if you feel strange,

​

strange things will happen to you:

Fallen peacocks on the library shelves"

​

3. Conrad Aiken, "Morning Song" from Senlin

​

"Vine-leaves tap my window,

Dewdrops sing to the garden stones,

The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree,

Repeating three clear tones."

​

4. Anonymous Welsh lullaby, "All Through the Night"

​

"Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee

All through the night."

​

Also Eddie Cooley and Otis Blackwell, "Fever"

​

"Fever all through the night."

​

5. Robert Lowell, "Skunk Hour"

​

"My mind's not right."

​

6. Hamlet III.2

​

"No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest; no offence i' the world."

​

7. C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

 

"their droppings, like those of the horse, are not offensive to themselves, or to me"

​

The protagonist is describing the aliens he lived with on Mars, who never had a "fall" as in the Garden of Eden.

​

8. Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

​

"I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes"

​

9. H. P. Lovecraft, e.g. "Shadow Over Innsmouth"

​

"Iä R'lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!"

​

R'lyeh is the undersea city where the monster-god Cthulhu lies dreaming.  Incidentally, the description three sentences earlier echoes Lovecraft's mentions of distorted geometries.

​

10. Frank Herbert, Dune

​

"Yueh!  Yueh!  A thousand deaths were not enough for Yueh!"

​

That's a children's chant about Dr. Yueh, who betrays the hero of the book.

​

11. T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"

​

"When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about the room again, alone"