The Midnight Curve

Info NAME OF TALE The Midnight Curve

Author: Tufto. This poem is part of the End of Death canon. More of Tufto's work can be found here. rating: +20 + – x

The following is from the juvenilia of the early Imperial poet Ruth Harlequin (born 1994). Despite the clear compositional flaws of this early work (dated to 2497) it provides an early glimpse at the themes she would explore in the 27th and 28th centuries.

1.

On the dirt paths that lead away

From dusty English hedgerows in the grey,

When the setting sun turns the grass

Into a strange and pinkish pallour,

A pallour of desperation,

When the hungry sun paws and claws at the memory of its former self.

That time of hazy day when the beast shines down

And all seems hidden,

All a lie beneath its happy rays.

All is turned, now, turned to dusk,

The truth of night crawling slowly

As shoes kick up the frail dust on the path

And the trees rustle in the breeze

And you watch.

Mud turned to grass turned to mud

As sheep and men tread upon it,

In timeless veneration of the old ways

Of the old rites bleeding through

To make our present lives so quick in rot and ruin.

Lines become pronounced, paved, expanded,

Monorails and trains rise like mausoleums

For the notion of a mausoleum.

Tombstone carriages are rushing through the night

Their living peering meekly

Over deep lakes and dishonoured paths

Where shepherds used to ply their trade.

What was it like to have ancestry?

To know the turning of the seasons, the play of weather and weir

That would take one's maiden aunts, one's grandmothers,

One's smiling childhood faces

That never had any worries except in one's understanding, long after the fact

Of adult and childhood memory

And arguments ill-understood.

To be, to live, to exist upon a wire

Strung out in a continuing spiral

Of birth, maturity, love, age, death-

Seeing in the old woman by the firelight, with stories so distant

The future of one's self, looking into the eyes of her past

A thing remote, of distance, of mystery

Of patterns long-sketched out and barely changing

So timeless that all meaning came only from continuation,

No endings or beginnings.

Only the repitition in endless cycles of seasons

Snow falling on autumn leaves falling on summer grass

One life in many lives, one meaning in many meanings,

No death in the knowledge of continuation, of having been made complete,

To an everlasting rest, or oblivion, or both,

And all was settled,

A whirlpool of perpetual autumn,

A ballerina dancing with her face still smiling,

And then the clocks all stopped.

2.

The cottage is bare

The food is all gone

She stands outside

Inside the autumn cold

One more day

One more life

Another movement,

And the Reaper dies

And the breeze runs through

And it howls its way

And knocks all the pots

And has nothing to say

And she is undone

She has no more to do

The sun is not raising

Its hullabaloo

The thatch and the straw

Enters its maw

The house

The house

The house is

When they find her,

Coming in from the long field

And the golden corn,

They rush to comfort her,

Laying down their burdens to help, to aid,

While all around the wind rips in,

Slicing new wounds

Making new thoughts

The desire to just stop, just for a day,

As the open sky rides roughshod on their backs

And makes them too old, too old for sleeping on the fields

So they swallow the bitter pill

Or sell themselves for dreaming

And the sun seems a little lighter on their back

While the trees grow from their hearts,

Their lonely hearts,

Too old for caring, for loving

When the story that bound them is gone

And there's no profit at the wishing well.

3.

The building is not used any more. The men and women inside pack it up, weeping slighly, wishing there could be some other way but there is none.

The rain keeps falling, falling, as they say a goodbye, a funeral to funerals, Morecambe and Sons packs up its coffins and bereavements and organisational frameworks and sympathetic mourners and walk out into the storm, the lightning falling but not hitting, to become new people.

The roof begins to fall in, as urban explorers and adventurers and pain-lovers looking for rusted nails come traipsing through.

Sterilised rats keep staring through the holes, as the wallpaper chips, as the leaks intensify, as the innards are eaten and looted

The worms of the overworld gnaw through walls, gnaw through wallpaper, gnawing, gnawing

The iron rods embedded in the concrete rise out of their crumbling mountains

It is an ending, it is a beginning, it is a death

The reapers of the mind will always come, killing forms to make anew, killing poems to spring them up again, change and death and change and death until there is no difference

Until the ballerina and the dance are one

Until it's all iron-

The ruin awakens, crying as a newborn. It sits where it was, perfectly still, as the men and women inside shine lights, weeping slightly, happy that they have found this place in which they can be

They light candles and sing songs of the old country, that discovered country,

They play guitars and form workers' communes and don't think about the inscription,

"Memento Mori" above the door,

It's not words any more. It's just a form, a geometric shape,

A monument to alchemical precision

Nobody speaks Latin any more

Latin is a dead language

And nothing is dead

Life expands into its space-

4.

-and expands more. Its greenery

Rises up from the rainforests, from the savannahs,

From the gaps between the sands, from the ocean floors,

Inexorably, constantly, rising,

Rising,

The tendrils merge and split and coalesce

In blocks of mass that dominate

Like the furnaces of empire

And squeeze the air out of the sky

Spreading into nooks, into crannies,

Into the gaps between the atoms

Into mouths and noses and the breathing bodies

That can't breath or struggle any more.

And all is immobile

In the endless march of life

In the cessation of all cessation

And there are no more ancestors,

No more stories, no more creation

Just the green,

Moss and lichen, flesh over flesh

That can't be seen

Because only the life can see,

And the life is growing

Eating, consuming

Colonising, imperialising

Making all one

Across the stars, making all one.

In the one there is nothing. A zero

Its absolute line singular and eating

Itself into itself into nothing.

A ballerina moves, in timeless grace,

Spinning and spinning and spinning more

Faster, faster, deeper, keener,

The human frailties and flaws ironed out

The motion's weakness becoming strong

Reinforced iron leaking from the armpits

Which are not armpits but hinges, joints,

The face is scrubbed away, the hair flies off

The flesh is moved into movement, into light,

Into insubstance,

Speed upon speed so that even the fire goes

And all that's left is movement

And the movement becomes the circle

And the circle goes on forever

Silent and still in its fury and noise.

Lolling and lolling and lolling.

5.

A man sits. The light is reflected

In the wet milk of his eyes

As the other man smiles and waves and slicks his hair back with a mullet grin

And stares out of his box

Into the eyes, the milquetoast eyes

His own existence oozing into the air

No sleep, no dreams, no pentecostal fire,

Just an open mouth, lolling,

And the television sirens calling.

This is but one state of being

In a world so ordered in its flux

A span of a thousand generations

Where one can sit and stare

And then get off their feet and walk

March, mine, replace

Create empires and kingdoms and New Kowloons

Reinvent oneself a thousand times

Experience it all, under the sun,

Become mulch, become man

Become alive in another way

That seems the same as every other way

But slowly, slowly,

That ordered chaos cracks its edges,

The whirlpool does not last, the hurricane retreats

The waves begin a new pattern

A swirl of activity to prove them wrong

To prove them all wrong-

And so, five centuries after we started

While the midnight curve stretches ever on

New worlds and ideas, with all the time on Earth

The body perfected, the mind swirling upwards,

The promise of future, of the reclamation of the damned,

Of the end of death truly ending death-

And still I think back

To the dirt paths

To the grandmothers

To the lives that were not parades of novelty

Of whipping-dens of orgies choosing their own trauma

Instead of time thrusting it upon them.

Under the maglev lines and concrete halls

Where the dirt tracks lie

In a quiet silence, under the bare stars

A blade of grass that bitter water grows

In memory of all that went before

Takes its old place, its old pattern,

By the sheep trail

And looks up

And blinks

And dies.