af H. P. Lovecraft & Agent C
I am writing the end of life endurable.
I have read these pages.
Why, it is forgetfulness or death,
the open victim at its very beginning
and the ocean forces of time.
When I could guess the sun and stars
nothing was in sight.
Scorching the shores of despair
in heaving broken blue change
for my slumber, I was to discover myself
in black, grounded distance.
Of wonder, of reality,
of other less describable things
from the nasty mud, there was nothing
save a vast stillness and fear.
The sun was black beneath my feet.
A thinking shade moved the ground
and seemed to travel in time.
Beneath me, the noise of ocean
was upon the dead things.
The vanished mind slept
in the shadow of my dreams
above the cold visions,
indeed unbroken of vague horror
greater than the world of eternal night.
As the sky I had imagined
where no light had filled me with the word,
young, strange, massive and thinking,
revealed the water of the trace,
the writing I had seen
in books unknown to the modern world
appeared to be under the waves as well.
In a moment the gods of the first glimpse
slid into view above the dark waters.
I think I went mad then. I remember
I sang unable to sing
in recollections out of the shadows
in a San Fransisco hospital.
My words knew nothing.
At night I see the thing.
So now I am written
the end. It
shall not
find me
(1917-2013)
