Poem 406

This is coming from three places … the experience of being in a car accident, the goddess Hine-nui-te-pō and the film The Hunger … I wanted to capture (first) the dissociation, surrealistic sense of confusion, rush of images and distortion of time experienced in a car crash, the ‘going out’ of oneself … then further than that the stretched packed split-seconds before death, then the moment/sense of death itself, the irrevocable and complete last dissociation (written from imagination obviously) …

… time is scrambled, in my mind this has a filmic flashback structure – the first stanza is in the wreckage, the deep stillness of post-crash, almost last instant of consciousness (last breath) of the narrator, then the poem flashes back to the previous hectic impressionistic seconds of collision before returning in the last stanza to the moment of death …

… the princess sleeping under glass speaks to the image of Snow White in her glass coffin but the ‘princess death’ I’m really thinking about is ‘great woman of the night’ Hine-nui-te-pō, imagining her appearing as a passenger in this car as it fatally loses control, this guy finding her in his arms, gradually realising who she is as she disintegrates like a desiccated mummy, Māui’s death crushed in her vulva mirrored by the collapse of the bench seat upholstery creating a ‘toothless join’ he’s pulled down … so the goddess of death comes to him in his moment, takes him through the transition, then departs ‘like warmth’ leaving him to it …

… stylish vampire film The Hunger featuring David Bowie, Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve came out about a year before I wrote this … it opened with a fractured fast-cutting impressionistic sequence (soundtracked by the Bauhaus song Bela Lugosi’s Dead) personifying death as a seductive woman … later the film showed mummified still-living vampires of the past including an ancient Egyptian princess …

… the poem also draws from a recurring nightmare of mine about being out of control, finding myself in the back seat of a speeding car that I’m meant to be driving …

… I like the references to the vehicle as a monster, behemoth, great beast … the sense of space being stretched as well as time so the inside of the vehicle seems huge and impossibly long (a sensory hallucination I had as a child with a fever) …

… the ‘driver’ whose back of the head the narrator sees is of course himself …

Princess Death

Underneath pallid glass
is the sleeping form
of princess death
my breath stirs her
dry perfect hair

in the back seat of the monster
I am rolling
holding someone within the cracked open
circle of my arm
                                 lights
finger fine quality
and recede
every seventh huge
a wash of white light the monster
shudders its entire length
leaps
sucking an imperfect hole through the moon
like a peppermint
I've lost the handle
the soft digestion of upholstery
has me sinking
spring by
                   spring on
                   monster on

shards of glare off steel glasses
the far back head of the driver
short pointed stick
in the skull of the behemoth
plate light eyes
who is it I'm holding
her hair sand
tiny fine rivulets
spilling into my hands
rattling into the satchel mouth
flapping bench seat set
like the lips of a carnivorous
flower
and sand keeps pouring
bursting from all her seams
dryly
she frays like old flags
I seize the handle
but it's someone's shoe
crackling like the weightless carcass
of a moth
everything is gone
down the toothless join
the seat heaves underneath me
the great beast stretches
belly down
spine bowed in mid-stride
stars a plasmatic sheen
a skin
and a sound

princess death
rises
from the accident
twists
away like warmth