Dark Hallway (or, The Last Line is Silence)
Poem
Round the hoary bend arrives
the soothing truth of everything.
With all relief, a hopeful grief,
an effect you seem to recognize
by the faintest glare of a floating ring.
A halo of white, a persistent thing
at the edge of the dark where the hall
goes to void. The mystery beyond––
a coming truth? A future fall?
Sight descends to a tunnel of black
and all you believe, all that you know––
the comfort you hold, the safety you lack,
the darkness you face, the yes of the no––
sees an answer arrive in a blinding trace.
A thing already past. The blinking bright
drawn together as a vision in your failing sight,
like the spots dancing around your head
after a flash, from a camera, in the calm of night.
After the shock of life, and familiar dread,
the memory of the opening in a moment gone,
your vision of the hallway an innocent lie,
the illusion of greater rooms around
a shadowy corner, each receptor standing by,
without sense, without sight, without feel or sound,
without future, or hallways, or hope, or light
without truth, in fact, or wrong, or right.
Steve Spehar
New Orleans, 2021
