with Dmetri Kakmi

Carnival of Souls

USA 1962

Director: Herk Harvey

Cast: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger, Herk Harvey

(Note to reader: this poem was channeled to your spiritualist correspondent by mr e.e. cummings from beyond the gravy)

Car veers off
A bridge with nary a sound
Three women go into the drink 

One to emerge (Mary)
Quite contrary
Though (un)scathed
Though amnesiac
Though stunned (as a mullet out of water)
Though morose (as a mongoose or a water buffalo when flensed)

Bigger than angel wings
Architecture is your fiend (Mary)
As u navigate alienated streets
That shadow is not yours to keep
(Where did it pick u up?)

“There goes a woman who doesn’t know her (two) mind(s).”

In the church of noise 
(Where pasteurised pastors display the compliance of doggod)
In the dancehall
(Where men are cheaper by the dozen that hit on u)
Your dislocation (Mary)
Is not a disturbance
To the world’s (febrile) fabric
U will not be missed
U who as an organist 
Thought to play (his organ)
Without belief in the Big O (God!)

Herk is not your Herkules 
He is the man in the whiter (yet) white face
Who haunts the corridors of your d
r
e
a
m
s
He is your stare case to no where (Mary)

U are not Bergman/
Like Herk says/
U are not Cocteau—
U are more like Antonioni 
More like (L’avventura)

A carny Monica Vitti 
Of lower yet high-flown (un)founded anxiety
Out on the shore (wild goose chase)
Though your hair does not fly 
This way and that (like a Vitti)
It is a dead pelmet (helmet)
Drawn across 
Excluding u

On the mudflat…
The dark pimple is variously (a tit) 
An abandoned 
bathhouse
dance hall
carnival 
That looms
A pavilion
Of dreams 
Still as a nightmare

“As if I don’t (co)exist. As if I don’t have a place in the world.”

Your scene chewing (un)tenanted (co)habitant
Across the hall
Is all malfeasance
His morning glory
Awkwardly aimed at your pianola
Is variously sleazoid barista
Is variously father figur(ine)
From which you flee

Is there a keener appetite at work (Mary)?

From whom do u run?
From what?
Is it …
Heaven & hell?
Or is it the
Mummydaddy (ghoul)
Come hither drifting through the throng 
Of childhood’s decay?

What’s a marvel Mary
Is u’ve come full circle
From unnoticed to (delayed
Acclimatised) acclaim
Posted to the posterior of 
Disorienting posterity
By the (not-so-simple) 
Act of simply dying
When u least expected

Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Woman in the Well, The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). He is now working on a crime novel called The Perfect Room.