Ben Debus
Three Studies of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu
Fifth Study of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu:
A Bedroom Scene
The Count growls from the stomach, skulks along
the wall of Hutter’s room, his step as tense
as air inside a bell which shakes to gong
between the curve and falling clapper. Dense
as the carillon afterwards, the crickets
beneath our hero’s pillow scrape their wings
together, chirp out song until he’s sick
and sits up in the bed – then Orlok swings
around like love, and pops his finger-joints,
his hands like two bouquets of clacking knives.
And Hutter wonders how such deadly points
can brush the hair so gently from his eyes.
But by the morning, Hutter’s such a bore,
and Orlok’s barge moves from the foggy shore.
Sixth Study of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu:
Orlok Arrives in the Town of Wismar
When a barge emerges from a shore-side’s fog,
its cargo boxed-up loess enough to sow
a crop of dahlias, fill a thousand clogs,
no crew aboard to guide the prow, and no
one in the town awake to see, the church-
bells clanging three, the hour between the last
day and the next, when time is like a lurching
hull in a shallows, none to tie it fast
against the dock, the trouble grows by squares:
by dawn, there’s one who’s died; by dusk, there’s two
who lope along the roofs. The next night glares
its lamps on four. Some say the plague, some flu –
but like a fanned ember, now dun, now bright,
the Nosferatu proteans through light.
Seventh Study of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu:
Orlok’s Last Supper
The Nosferatu proteans through light –
his hand becomes the shadow it projects
and casts a clawing up a wall, pools tight
to fist the lowing thump in Ellen’s chest.
She grabs her breast. He slides into her room
as if his body’d slipstreamed up its shade,
now solid, clacking nails which stretch to blooms
of thorn, which smooth along her body’s shape.
He crooks to gorge, and glows, an X-ray’s forms,
a flail of back-lit clearness in the dark.
No one beats upon the door; there is no storm
that settles as the morning wakes the larks.
A sudden lens-tint dawn, and that is all –
the Nosferatu, swathed in sun, dissolves.
Ben Debus is a recent graduate of Indiana University's MFA program. His poetry has appeared in Subtropics, and he has placed third and first, respectively, in the Academy of American Poets/Vera Meyer Strube Poetry Prize. He currently resides in Chicago with his fiancee, poet Cate Whetzel, and works at a law office.
