Prose Poem [To the Great Salt Heart Return the Veined Rivers]

The truck came down the side road at about sixty. The driver was drunk and happy; a minute after he hit the curb he was sober and cursing his luck.

. . . He stepped off from the gutter. There were three moments, three phases perhaps. In the first he was thinking of Judy and a few others: into his mohammedan heaven broke the roar, then the impact of the truck; he jumped back almost in time, but slipped on the snow-slush.

Then the third, slow and heavy; the darkness coiled round him eddying; he was a continent and there was night over it; from cape and inlet the tide fell away; life in him could not sustain unaided the weight of mountain and canyon, withdrew, till it flickered only on the screen behind the eyelids. He could see it there, like a candle at the bottom of a well; knew that it could go out. It dared and died.

Immense darkness was a cloak around him; set like a desk-mask on his cheeks. It has been like this before, it has been like this before, he knew; it will be like this again.

In place of the light a mist grew, white and choking. Through it came a face, unknown and serious, lined, framed in linen.

‘Both legs amputated,’ said a voice, low and remote. ‘Poor b—, I thought he was gone just then.’

1944 (7)