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.
