The River Stairs

This one's a bit different from my usual stuff. A lot more consciously Gothic than I'd normally aim for, but it came from a dream/nightmare I had, which was just too vivid not to turn into a poem. I don't tend to use dreams for inspiration very often at all, but maybe it's something I should consider more.

As well as the dream I took some ideas and imagery from the Canadian folk tale of La Chasse-galerie and Malicorne's chilling song La Chasse Gallery about the old French legend which in turn inspired that; also Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald, about the sinking of a Great Lakes bulker in 1975; a line from Act IV, Scene III of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar; and finally a passage from Chapter 4 of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men On The Bummel about the mystery of the body clock, which is where I got the title.

THE RIVER STAIRS

Edmund thought he knew his place
He tripped through the darkness
Of a house as black as pitch
Through a hatchway to the river stairs.

A song, a shout on nocturnal airs?                            
He tiptoed on the greasy boards
Of his stage that status built
To investigate the narrow bank.

In misty shadows, swift and dank
He felt the river's fingers fly out
Of a flow wherein some ghostly watchman waited

'La Chasse-Galerie'

To take his tide of fortune at the flood.
                                                                         
A quickening then of the blood?
He heard his heartbeat as a drum
Of fear and loss of power
To turn aside the mighty course.

Faster than a galloping horse
He froze at the approach
Of a ship of souls without a captain
To turn the helm away.

Why never seen by day?
He knew the lines, the treacherous boards
Of his stage and his chosen part
To play no more.

SS Edmund Fitzgerald

Sweeping the drowning shore
He glimpsed the deadly wake
Of Gallery's galleon begin
To overwhelm his hope.

For him no further line nor rope?
He saw his dark house crumble out
Of time, of place, of reality
To rise again elsewhere.

From the muddy river stairs
He vanished from the sight and sound
Of future's dawn
To leave never a trace.

Does tragic Edmund voyage nightly in the race?
The waves will never give up their dead
Something still waits, and so beware
For along the bank, the river stares.


Thanks to: Jerome K. Jerome for Three Men On The Bummel, Gordon Lightfoot for The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald, William Shakespeare for Julius Caesar, and Malicorne for La Chasse Gallery.