Obsession
       

Tenacious, parasitic ghost,
You eat my substance steadily;
I who fear inanition most
Meet it in you engrossing me.

You share my narrow bed; you make
My thoughts your own, your own my blood;
Dire breath of evil, what can slake
Your dark thirst to consume my good?

That you are nothing, yet exist!
You feed as shadow on the light
And grow—on what shall I subsist?
You, the abhorred, besiege my sight;

You multiply before my eyes,
As manifold as pain or error,
Sit in the fixed mind and devise
Your own malign loose shapes of terror:

I see them crouching everywhere,
May yet become their myriad hands,
Innumerable mouths that dare,
Unformed, to glut their own demands.

Illusive many! you are one—
Privation of the saving thought;
Dreading what still must be, I run
Lost to what is for what is not.

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Copyright © 2015 Catherine Breese Davis All rights reserved
from Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life & Work of an American Master
Pleiades Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission