Dryshod

Salvador Dali, ‘Landscape with a Girl Skipping Rope’, 1936

‘The good people of Auchtermuchty were in perfect raptures with the preacher, who had thus sent them to Hell by the slump, tag-rag, and bobtail! Nothing in the world delights a truly religious people so much as consigning them to eternal damnation.’

— James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

In the middle of life, I awoke. If not that then I slumbered into a very real dream, more real to me than my own childhood — one of dreams, and play, and flights of imagination. 

Either way, I came to with an awareness of four things: overexposure to the sun; a superabundance of water rising above my ankles; the pull of gravity dragging me down from the high lands where the vantage point had been vast; and a keen sense that I was being pursued. Conditions for growth, when pondered too long, appear as instruments of oppression. 

I never once looked back, though I questioned every step forward. And soon I arrived at the shore of impassable nature. 

Before me stood the sea, calm and still and much more frightening than it had seemed from high above where I was accustomed to seeing it. 

Goaded by the sun, discomforted by wet feet, dreading my shadow behind me, and in thrall to the terrestrial pull, I uttered a prayer of bargain to that which had power to listen and I pledged a new faith, thinking myself ruined and the world doomed...

I threw myself headlong into the sea
And found there a mouthful of mud.
Worms, like teeth, squirmed, fell and landed heavily
Where the world crumbled into crud.

Through shut eyes, the sunlight passed a dull red —
A red legion of dullness
That drilled to the drum of dust around my head
And plucked the hairs from time's fulness.

Behind me, phantoms of forgotten foes
Gave chase. Their hearts were set to stone
By a lament that knew far greater woes.
With each footfall their fates were sewn.

I saw water quiver into solid form
And the sea broke into two walls
Of tiny droplets in a compact swarm.
So I swam where the mole crab crawls.

I burrowed my way deep to the far shore,
Cooled, dryshod, untethered from the earth.
Here, there was no foreboding anymore
of death, nor memory of birth.

Crusting and withered as wishes,
One by one, all evils, all woes, all pain
Fossilised with the fishes.
All things, both bad and good, all things were slain.

I watched the withheld waves explode —
Horse and rider of my fears eaten whole —
And could scarce explain the new load
Of discontent that weighed hard 'pon my soul.

The expiring bodies of my
Darkest dreads washed up lifeless on the dirt.
There, seen for the first time, they died,
Entangled with bodies of joy and mirth.

"Rejoice!" said my saviour, his face was twisted
By a triumphant snarl; "Be glad! rejoice!"
He pointed to my dry feet and listed
All they had trod, with an infernal voice.