From the collection Blues Poems selected and edited by Kevin Young
Nosferatu Blues
To be honest, I love your awkwardness most.
Not the naughty plumage of your lipsOr the splayed wildcat of your accent
Or the unexploded heartbeat of your paintings,But your uneasiness in crowds–
How you skirted the edgesAnd wandered companionless,
Fidgeted and tried to mingle.What should I tell the torch-bearing mob?
That I longed for you like a lost dog,Spent an undead winter wondering
What your throat tasted of?How you sashayed across white-haired sidewalks
Into the end credits of back-projected afternoons?Or just how your car flashed silver in the sun,
Your voice shot through with radio and slang?Shit, damn, what does it matter.
I’d settle for some broken piano chords,For a half-finished B-movie from the 60s
To walk around in.Then again, you know, I know, forgive me, but
What South Carolina do you dream in whoever’s
bed tonight?What flaming hotels, what French aviators,
What ginger ale?~ Jeff Fallis
Poems are funny sometimes in how they can strike you one moment, confound or frustrate you the next. Reading through this excellent collection, this poem jumped out and hit a nerve in me. I brought to it, and with it, a background and love of movies, visions of Max Schreck and Klaus Kinski. I thought about all those images of vampires that have come since Stoker — the Bela Lugosi, Anne Rice’s Louis, the Frank Langella, the Anita Blake prey, and now the Edward Cullen — and none of them can shake those black and white German Expressionist shadows, those angled buildings and stilted expressions that treated celluloid like a canvas rather than an entertainment.
This poem holds me until the last two stanzas, when my world crashes into the poet’s. Not that the poet didn’t have a specific object in mind, but as I read I could project into these words and feelings my own sense of what it means to be in thrall of such a creature. At the end the details become too specific for my images to hold and suddenly I feel shut out. And that’s appropriate, because this is not my Nosferatu.
I understand the Poetry Friday roundup is at Brimstone Soup today.
Concur. What don’t I know that would make sense of the last two stanzas? He does ask for forgiveness and maybe that’s of the reader, too, because he’s going to get personal and leave us in confusion. But holy crap! The images in the opening—arresting.
And I remember watching Nosferatu at—get this—a church youth retreat for Halloween. Talk about an unholy mix.
Wow, I love this. Thanks for posting it.
Oh, thanks for saying you lost it in the last two stanzas, too. I was briefly frustrated that I wasn’t getting the reference.
I try to embrace poetry in every aspect, but sometimes I don’t think I know enough to do so… so it was cool to find out it wasn’t just me.
This is a NICE antidote for Twilight. Definitely.
I think we were on the same wave length today, David. The Bill Brandt I posted has the same “black and white Germanic shadows,” yes? That’s because, as you say, the celluloid (whether in a still camera or a moving camera) was a canvas. I’m sure you know the documentary VISIONS OF LIGHT – a discussion among cinematographers (still calling themselves “Directors of Photography”!) about the use of light and dark – which feels to me like what Nosferatu is all about – Count Orlock and his shadow on the wall!!