Deathbed Confession

“All I got was a message from Wetherell saying,

‘Can you make me a monster?’”

Christian Spurling, inventor of the Loch Ness Monster

Waking nameless in a grey

rolled light,

on a bed bolted to a wall in the hold

of a ship off England’s southern coast,

strangely queasy,

memory lost,

I felt the moment stretch and touch

the edge of terror before,

across the cabin his shape emerged

from uniform gloom,

and one by one,

the shapes we’d gathered there:

the Irish whiskey; two plastic cups;

an open suitcase;

somewhere in the list,

my life.

All of which comes back this morning

as her shape rises from newsprint dots,

floating

in the famous gloom

of 1934 Loch Ness,

above her, the headline

we knew would come:

Loch Ness Monster A Fraud

Inventor Confesses

Another deathbed truth, the millions of them

rising from our lives

like light from dead stars,

and, by this world‘s measure,

no great loss, except

it’s nothing now, the Loch

that once was hers:

empty as the lives

we rise into some mornings,

waking to a queasiness,

afraid, almost,

to wonder who we are in this immortal dark;

who it was first made us up,

at whose request;

whose fraud,

the lives we lift into this world,

the emptiness we lift them from.