The Mummy | “I feel as though it isn’t me who lives…”

The Mummy

I

His mind is crammed with memories.

(The eternal grinding of the same truth:

the grimace of evil, the evilness of evil,

the evil of the evil’s evil.)

The rotten mouth flirts:

what happened in 1968 anno domini, it says,

reflects, clear as in dead water,

the events of 1968 before Christ.

He moves, looks into the swollen water.

You came, you saw, you understood.

You understood, you came, you saw.

You came and saw

all that has been understood,

cannot understand any of it.

Still, he asserts himself:

the affirmation of the corpse,

a reanimation as thorough as birth,

the democracy of the cemetery.

No need for eyes.

No need for feet.

All effort’s useless.

And useless is the head

on the rudimentary shoulders.

The king of nature, the crown

of creation

grows larger,

which is to say,

grows smaller.

II

Fading is healing.

Recovery comes through self-loss.

Perfection by means of destruction.

Fulfillment by means of madness.

An arrangement of many heads

stacked one on top of another

(the first one is asleep,

the second’s asleep,

the third one—asleep,

the fourth, the fifth—ad infinitum!—

asleep).

The one at the top surveils their dreams.

III

Throw a stone—

it makes even, widening circles.

Catch the circles—

they come back together

into something much

like a coil.

Pull out the stone—

see the hole gape black.

*

I feel as though it isn’t me who lives

but someone else who lives instead of me,

my look-alike.

No eyes, nor ears,

nor mouth, nor feet, nor arms. A stranger

in his own body. A self-encapsulated

lump of pain suspended in the pitch-black gloom.

Since you were born, you’ve only become barer,

you haven’t grown into your body. Haven’t reached

your flesh. All you do is wander in the between-

worlds, merely stirring at the bottom

of an existence not your own.

Ahead, behind,

on either side there loom the myriads of nights,

the silent chrysalis pulsates between them:

it sizzles white-hot from self-pain,

a hellish speck and a laconic scream

amidst the stars, a tiny pellet of the sun,

a foreign object dissipated in the body.

You think your real birth is yet to happen,

while death came into you a long time ago.

“Мумія” and “Мені здається, що живу не я…” from Твори, Том І, книга 1. Львів: Просвіта, 1994.

Image by Antonio Carrau.