The Whiteness of the Wail

All monsters face north.

Frankenstein’s creature scrambles over icebergs, and stops every thousandth step to stare straight upward, at the pole star, pulsing and emitting frigid stabs of light. The wendigo comes roaring over the ice floes, invisible and ineffable destroyer. Saucer-Nazis hover in clouds of antigravity hum. One-eyed Wotan crouches alone in blood-matted furs, huddled over a crack in the earth, warming his hands on deep volcanic glow. Russian ICBMs approach, gliding toward the pole on NORAD radar screens, tiny white blips, glimmers of thermonuclear doom, chittering like ghost-larva.

Here, at the uppermost spot on earth, Nordic neverland, there is no east nor west, only south in every direction.

Here, in the true north, the sun never sets, but merely declines into the horizon’s mist-fire, then looms upward - a throbbing blur - again.

In the ultimate north, Valkyries fall in electromagnetic sleet-storms, a rain of screaming virgin battle-rage, turned into light and a slime of freezing tears.

Icebergs creak and moan in a language known only to themselves.

A storm blows up, a death-blast of snow, the most beautiful of powders, whiter than any pure Germanic amphetamine, finer than anesthetic cocaine, more powerful than any pristine squalls of heroin.

Here, in this absolute here, the center of the Ur-storm, there is only sound, the whiteness of the wail, the first and final emanation of the frozen glare-midden. All colors and none, absolute presence and absence. Last cry of oblivion, suction-din draws souls from flesh, eyes from sockets, hair from skin, crystals from their grids, boulders from the earth. Pulling everything upward, into itself.

There are the black holes of outer space. And there are the red holes of the human body. But only one white hole of the north. And it opens its vast mouth, breathing all and nothing, eternity and time itself, inward, into the whiteness.

And then, again, lets loose, a wail wider than the entire world.