Where Human Pathways End
Page 14
The Tree
WHERE GROWS THE TREE
To coffin me?
In what deep wood
Dark sentry stood
From century to century
To cry a halt to me?
Does the wolf there
Make the carrion lair;
Or pellets of fur and bone
Mark where the owl has flown
Into his hermit’s hole
Within the wrinkled bole?
What lovers have rested here?
Ophelia, on her bier:
Titania, and the ass’s head,
Adonis, newly dead?
And what portentous mark
Left carved upon the bark?
Who striped the grain
Tore at these knots in vain—
The Tiger’s claws?
The forest roars
Gravely his name
Perhaps he came.
Came too the ape,
Squat, crookbook shape
To swing and browse
On the upper boughs?
Festooned there python and the sloth,
And horned Ashtaroth?
Is it here the flying fox
Upside-down her cradle rocks?
Or the bloated vampire rests?
Or the harpies make their nests,
Keeping up a parrot chatter
About—no matter?
Underneath the roots what pig
Has used his tusks and snout to dig?
Whose the entrails he’s unwound
From that red gash in the ground?
Was it the mandrake’s scream
In my dream?
Who is it weaves
Among the leaves
An old string bag?
Atropine hag,
Or swol’n tarantula
Glutted on my fallen star?
* * * * *
Black mast and shrouds
Dimmed the clouds,
This thud of earth
Drummed at my birth,
The twisted screws,
Screamed ‘Choose’!
Behold my wake,
Sloughed skin of snake!
In this barque
Chorus of Ark
Sounds timeless horror dim
Of Styx in stink of sin.
What can keep out
The hideous rout?
Will nothing hold
Back the cold,
Or keep at bay
Horizonless decay?
Shamus Frazer
Singapore 1954
Sources
Of the stories collected together by Shamus Frazer prior to his death in 1966, which he intended to publish as a collection entitled Where Human Pathways End, only five had seen previous publication. The unpublished tales—‘Mr Nicholas Loses Grip’, ‘The Deepest Lady in Singapore’, ‘Walking on Air’, ‘Khorassim’, and ‘Obituary’, as well as the poem ‘The Tre’—are published here for the first time. The remaining five stories first saw publication as follows:
‘Florinda’
London Mystery Magazine #29, 1956
‘The Yew Tree’
London Mystery Magazine #39, 1958
‘The Tune in Dan’s Café’
Lie Ten Nights Awake, Herbert van Thal, ed., Hodder, 1967
‘The Fifth Mask’
London Mystery Magazine #33, 1957
‘The Cyclops Juju’
The Tandem Book of Horror Stories, Charles Birkin, ed., Tandem Books 1965
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