handful_ofdust (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
handful_ofdust) wrote2008-09-10 01:09 pm
handful_ofdust) wrote2008-09-10 01:09 pm
Entry tags:
"Jar of Salts"
I tried to get this done in time for Lovecraft's birthday, but it didn't work out. Today, however, things are apparently different--I fitted it up to my own satisfaction within minutes. Enjoy.
JAR OF SALTS
I found it here, under the floorboards,
labelled in a spidery hand: O nameless name,
old ancestor, return. I swear, if I am asked,
to speak these words, pray to no known god,
burn herbs, pour out the contents,
mix well with blood (my own will do), and wait.
The stopper, a plug of wax, is flecked
with grains of dusty incense—
a charnel odor at the back of the tongue,
unexpellable, sussurant, sere.
Who knows who hid it here? Who laid
these clues, a widdershins path, for me
to follow? Who sends me dreams of deep
and rocky fathoms, drowned bells tolling?
I only know I was not made like others,
my jawbones traced with the fluting
of unopened gills. How, reading these labels,
I feel my eyes already burn, begin to bulge.
The smell of salt is everywhere, sick-fragrant,
like decay—muck and silt, old entrails, slime.
All the varying grossness of some fruiting trench
that rings this world, Leviathan-vast,
where sunken Ys’s gates gape still, waiting.
This much I feared, even before I opened it:
Those of my blood live long, then fall
forward, into water. The open hole
at the dead sea’s bottom. So what matter
whose name I call now, in the gathering dark?
Our echo thrums forward, cleaving stone to bone.
JAR OF SALTS
I found it here, under the floorboards,
labelled in a spidery hand: O nameless name,
old ancestor, return. I swear, if I am asked,
to speak these words, pray to no known god,
burn herbs, pour out the contents,
mix well with blood (my own will do), and wait.
The stopper, a plug of wax, is flecked
with grains of dusty incense—
a charnel odor at the back of the tongue,
unexpellable, sussurant, sere.
Who knows who hid it here? Who laid
these clues, a widdershins path, for me
to follow? Who sends me dreams of deep
and rocky fathoms, drowned bells tolling?
I only know I was not made like others,
my jawbones traced with the fluting
of unopened gills. How, reading these labels,
I feel my eyes already burn, begin to bulge.
The smell of salt is everywhere, sick-fragrant,
like decay—muck and silt, old entrails, slime.
All the varying grossness of some fruiting trench
that rings this world, Leviathan-vast,
where sunken Ys’s gates gape still, waiting.
This much I feared, even before I opened it:
Those of my blood live long, then fall
forward, into water. The open hole
at the dead sea’s bottom. So what matter
whose name I call now, in the gathering dark?
Our echo thrums forward, cleaving stone to bone.
no subject
no subject
Strange Horizons? Lone Star Stories? Goblin Fruit?
no subject
no subject
no subject
Best of luck!