Something so beautiful brought me down here and it's terrible

My poem "The Ghost Marriage" is now online at Uncanny Magazine. It was directly inspired by Roy William Neil's Black Angel (1946), specifically by a line in my Patreon review: "Somewhere the ghost marriage is still going on." Even as I wrote it, I knew the image would stick with me until I did something else with it. I would have enjoyed something sunnier, but it's a bittersweet film: the same actions that open a space for the possibility of romance between the protagonists have already closed it even as their relationship plays itself out, a contrafactual clause from the beginning. They are a kind of half-flipped Orpheus and Eurydike, June Vincent's Cathy questing to recover her husband from death, Dan Duryea's Marty surprisedly finding a reason to come back into the light. From that perspective, it is even less surprising that the film ends as it does. When the underworld gets involved, someone always has to stay below. I seem to believe that is still not quite the same as gone.

His mouth is open and the light rains down

I just realized that Laura Veirs' "Sleeper in the Valley" (July Flame, 2010) chills me for the exact same reasons as Bulgakov's "The Red Crown" (1922). It is not so much that they are both narratives about death, in war, too young: it is the way death in both stories serves as a kind of doom, confirming the transformation into something the characters never knew they had made the decision to be. The title character of Veirs' song is not alive, although the listener might be briefly fooled by the dreamy images of a green hollow and the music of bluebells and streams; the crows that gather to "the two red holes in his right side" know better. The second verse clicks it into place:

Sleeping in the sun, his hand on his breast
The nape of his neck in the blue watercress
He was just a kid and he never knew
He would be the sleeper in the valley so soon

The kid and the sleeper in the valley are not the same person; one was always fated to turn into the other, even if he didn't know the dead identity that was waiting for him when he signed up to fight. Just so the narrator of "The Red Crown," haunted by the apparition of the blind, blood-crowned, nameless "horseman" who was once the younger brother he tried only too late to rescue from the war, dreams once of Kolya as he was in life, a piano-playing student with bright eyes and tousled hair instead of the faceless "red crown" that is the emblem of his death, and imagines in that moment that his brother "had never gone away and had never been a horseman." The sleeper in the valley, the horseman are the things people become when they are dead; their selves are past tense, even when their presence—bodies, ghosts—remains. Those two red holes do not belong on a living body, however youthfully resting. Bulgakov's narrator can see the horseman every night, but Kolya's not coming back.

I got all the way through this post before thinking to look into Veirs' own thoughts on the song, at which point I learned that her "Sleeper in the Valley" is an adaptation of the Rimbaud poem of the same name. Which does not give me the same chill, because while it describes the dead young soldier in even more poignant detail, it does not distinguish between his two identities in the same way as Veirs' additional lyrics, nor does it return to the image of the two red holes with an underscore of interested crows that Veirs uses for a chorus. It's a very short song, but I find it as effective as a nightmare: it has the same terror of the things you can't see. I'm not surprised there's no actual connection to Bulgakov's story, but the fact that I find the technique so effective and unsettling in both cases means I should see if I've ever used it myself, or if I should start. It's October; I think of these things.