VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)
In the mutating world
every womb is betrayal.
A village walled in sleep,
an abyss opening beneath it.
An unyoked tractor pulls and turns
circles as it tears the earth.
A sink fills, overflowing
smoothly onto the floor.
An iron burns through
a patterned dress.
A needle stutters and digs
a record’s vinyl trench.
Village women fill with children.
The hedge teems with cuckoos.
A wife plunges her hand
into boiling water.
A father fits a gun
into his mouth.
A teacher stands in front
of a classroom of children—
children as blinding as suns—
Inside him is a wall
crumbles to scree.
Eviction has begun.
In the graveyard we found the map
looming in a shack without heat or light
and there on the desk the plain wooden box,
brimming with pushpins black and white.
We heard off in the ragged distance
a chisel strike granite like a lead bell,
the gritty scrape of shovel cleaving earth,
the pluvial sidewalks with their chalk smell.
Behind the gate’s writhing ironwork
a blow with the flat of the blade
breads the face with grains of dirt.
That’s why shovels were made.
We drive all night to escape, as tired
as Richard Boone's face. Insects smother
the windshield, gravel cackles beneath.
We have nothing to say to each other.
We’re lost, the map we unfold enormous,
glowing like delirium, bearing down.
Richard Boone arrives, takes control, you
and I coming apart beneath his frown.
At midnight, it is revelry's climax,
and the revelers must lose their disguise.
“Sir, you should unmask,” Camille says to him.
"I wear no mask," Richard Boone replies.
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