Come on All You Ghosts (2 page)

wearing a suit of light.

It's too easy to be

strange. I glow

reading a few pages

of an ancient Chinese poet

to calm me, but soon

I am traveling down

terrible roads

like an insect chased

by golden armies.

Then I am tired in a little boat

filling with smoke.

Then in the seasonably

cold morning I am

once again missing my friends.

Some have been sent

to the capital to take

their exams or work for a while

or be slowly executed. I

cannot help them, I am trying

to build a straw hut

beside the transparent river.

The sky is a perfect

black dome, with stars

that look white but

are actually slightly blue.

I have two precious candles

to last me a night

that has suddenly come.

I feel the lives of cities

drift through me,

I am a beautiful scroll

on which the history

of a dynasty has been written

in a dead language

not even one lonely scholar knows.

I see sad crushed plastic

everywhere and put

some thoughts composed

of words that do not

belong together

together and feel

a little digital hope.

Oh this Diet Coke is really good,

though come to think of it it tastes

like nothing plus the idea of chocolate,

or an acquaintance of chocolate

speaking fondly of certain times

it and chocolate had spoken of nothing,

or nothing remembering a field

in which it once ate the most wondrous

sandwich of ham and rustic chambered cheese

yet still wished for a piece of chocolate

before the lone walk back through

the corn then the darkening forest

to the disappointing village and its super

creepy bed and breakfast. With secret despair

I returned to the city. Something

seemed to be waiting for me.

Maybe the “chosen guide” Wordsworth

wrote he would even were it “nothing

better than a wandering cloud”

have followed which of course to me

and everyone sounds amazing.

All I follow is my own desire,

sometimes to feel, sometimes to be

at least a little more than intermittently

at ease with being loved. I am never

at ease. Not with hours I can read or walk

and look at the brightly colored

houses filled with lives, not with night

when I lie on my back and listen,

not with the hallway, definitely

not with baseball, definitely

not with time. Poor Coleridge, son

of a Vicar and a lake, he could not feel

the energy. No present joy, no cheerful

confidence, just love of friends and the wind

taking his arrow away. Come to the edge

the edge beckoned softly. Take

this cup full of darkness and stay as long

as you want and maybe a little longer.

In Burma right now people are screaming.

Inside their monasteries the monks are sealed.

“Blood and broken glass.”

I feel I would drink a glass of poison,

In order to help,

But that's probably a lie.

Another perfect day filled with perfectly vertical light and crickets.

I feel the presence of lithium.

They are pumping it into our waters.

I want to do important work.

People not places are haunted.

Who is in that chair?

I want to stop pretending.

I don't feel like I'm pretending,

But I want to be free

Of this important feeling:

To love each other more

Than we currently do

Is a terrible violence

To our future selves.

Which is not what I want.

Drunker than Voyager 1

but not as Voyager 2 I rode my blue

bike back through the darkness

to my lonely geode cave of light

awaiting nothing under the punctured

dome. I had achieved escape

velocity drinking clear liquid starlight

at the Thunderbird with a fingerless

Russian hedge fund inspector and one

who called himself The Champ. All

night I felt fine crystals cutting

my lips like rising up through

a hailstorm. And the great vacuum

cleaner that cannot be filled moved

through my chest, gathering

conversation dust and discharging

it through my borehole. During

one of many silences The Champ

took off his face and thus were many

gears to much metallic laughter

revealed. Long ago I forgot

the word which used to mean in truth

but now expresses disbelief. So

quickly did my future come. You who

are floating past me on your inward way,

please inform those glowing faces

who first gave me this shove I have

managed to rotate my brilliant

golden array despite their instructions.

All day I've felt today is a holiday,

but the calendar is blank.

Maybe it's Lamp Day. There is

one very small one I love

so much I have taken it everywhere,

even with its loose switch.

On its porcelain shade are painted

tiny red flowers, clearly

by someone whose careful

hand we will never know.

Because it's Lamp Day I'm trying

to remember where I got it,

maybe it was waiting for me

in the house on Summer Street

I moved into almost exactly

17 years ago. I think

without thinking I just picked it

up from the floor and put it

on my desk and plugged

it into the socket and already

I was working. So much

since that moment has happened.

On Lamp Day we try

not dreamily but systematically

to remember it all. I do it

by thinking about the hidden

reasons I love something

small. When you take

a series of careful steps

to solve a complex problem,

mathematicians call it an algorithm.

It's like moving through

a series of rooms, each with

two doors, you must choose one,

you can't go back. I begin

by sitting on a bench in the sun

on September 21st thinking

all the walks I have taken

in all the cities I have chosen

to live in or visit with loved ones

and alone make a sunlit

and rainy map no one

will ever be able to hold.

Is this important? Yes and no.

Now I am staring

at clean metal girders.

People keep walking past

a hotel, its bright

glass calmly reflecting

everything bad and good.

Blue boots. Bright glass.

Guests in this moment. A child

through the puddles steps

exuberant, clearly feeling the power.

I am plugged in. I am calm.

Lamp Day has a name.

Just like this cup

that has somehow drifted

into my life, and towards which

sometimes for its own reasons

my hand drifts in turn.

Upon it is written the single

word Omaha.

The tiny bee on its mission

died before it felt a thing. Its

body rested for a moment

on the railing of my sunny

porch in California. Then

wind took it away. You

are an older sister now so

it's true the world owes you

massive reparations. Also

you have special alarm

pheromones implanted

in your nose that explode

with
Phacelia distans

i.e. wild heliotrope each time

what they say will happen

turns out to be a compendium

of what can never exactly

be. Today the electric bus

full of humans listening

through tiny flesh colored

earbuds to the music news

or literature perfectly calibrated

to their needs kneels before

the young man in his gleaming

black wheelchair. Inside

green laboratories experiments

in the realm of tiny particles

are being for our vast benefit

completed. Already I can see

the same little wrinkle I have

appearing on your brow.

You were born to feel a way

you don't have a word for.

With those two words in my mouth

I woke up laughing, for only the second

time in my life. Before bed I had been

reading a book about the Renaissance.

All they really know is it was dirty.

I slept and dreamt of complicated

financial arrangements. Then

the Midwest. I have always loved

the loneliness of those midsized cities

strewn along the plains, in them

it seems to me my heart would at last

be that open field where an entirely

new love could snow. Dobby lives

in Minnesota and seems basically happy.

I believe I've never seen him

wear a sweatshirt. I'm not even sure

that's his real name. Is he a ghost?

Probably. A ghost of happiness. Dobby's

sweatshirt. It's where I want to bury

my face when lonely possibility comes.

Last night I heard faint music moving

up through the floor. The thought

I could be one who falls asleep and dreams

some brave act and wakes to actually

do it flapped through me, brief breeze

through a somnolent flag. Across

the room my cell phone periodically

shone a red light indicating someone

was failing to reach me. Your body

kept barely lifting the sheet. I think

my late night thoughts and feelings

about my life are composed

of fine particles that drift far from me

to periodically settle on apartment

or office buildings. Feel the heat

and pulsation within. A man sits

in the Institute of National Memory

examining files. They contain accounts

of what certain people believed other

more powerful people would want

to permit themselves to believe

regular people were choosing to do

all through the years that like terrible

ordinary babies one after another

crawled, grasping daily acts and placing

them into these files anyone now

can hold. Read about the life

of the great ordinary Citizen Z. How

he attended funerals and horrible boring

literary parties, aging and thinking

of his anonymity and writing journals

he later felt he must destroy, and calmly

against his will periodically meeting

in hotel bars with the sad men who asked

questions that along with the answers

they all knew would end in these yellow files.

Each has a label marked with three

or four obscure numbers followed by

a dash followed by three initials.

Europe you had your time. Now

it is ours to drag everyone into a totally

ghost free 21st century whiteness.

Today a ladybug flew through my window. I was reading

about the snowy plumage of the Willow Ptarmigan

and the song of the Nashville Warbler. I was reading

the history of weather, how they agreed at last

to disagree on cloud categories. I was reading a chronicle

of the boredom that called itself The Great Loneliness

and caused a war. I was reading mosquitoes rode

to Hawaii on the same ship that brought the eucalyptus

to California to function now as a terrible fire accelerator.

Next to me almost aloud a book said doctors can

already transplant faces. Another said you know January

can never be June so why don't you sleep little candle?

A third one murmured some days are too good,

they had to have been invented in a lab. I was paging

through a book of unsent postcards. Some blazed

with light, others were a little dim as if someone

had breathed on the lens. In one it forever snowed

on a city known as the Emerald in Embers, the sun had

always just gone behind the mountains, never to return,

and glass buildings over the harbor stayed filled with

a sad green unrelated light. The postcard was called

The Window Washers. In handwriting it said

Someone left an important window open, and Night

the black wasp flew in and lay on the sill and died.

Sometimes I stop reading and find long black hairs

on my keyboard and would like you to know that in 1992

I mixed Clairol Dye #2 with my damaged bleached hair

to create a blue green never seen before, my best look

according to the girl at the counter who smiled only once,

I know less than I did before, and I live on a hill where

the wind steals music from everything and brings it to me.

Go we must in search of searching

not very helpfully said the little red ant

attached to the golden chain attached to

my wrist. He was no bigger than a

molecule, the chain was a quantum chain.

It was Sunday morning, we were

following the restless backpackers into

the city guidebooks called a manageable

fountain of leisure. Unbeknownst they

carried dark lanterns, they were

Nameless ones. The inhabitants into

various churches emptied leaving only

scattered women in multicolored house

coats feeding pigeons and a boy skater

performing slenderly his fabulous tricks.

Some parks are small, perfect for falling

asleep. Then you can wake and leave

them for someone who needs to find

out what happens when you build

a grand arcade of your finest thoughts

to shimmer, waiting for no one. I lay on

my back. Light with the faintest tetrophene

hint touched lightly my blue metallic skin.

A bike leaned against a wall. I thought

of my first day planner, turquoise and

laminated not unlike the calm and glassy

lake I broke the surface of as a child

those days everyone was equal. So much

architecture, said my russet friend. He

was a menshevik, red but also transparent.

If you bent and looked very closely

you could see the pulse behind each of

his black ventricular eyes. A golem

stopped to check his touristical map.

He wanted to see a few more rooftops

against the sky before he sighed and

took the funicular up the long curved

path that leads to the castle and turned

totally unlike me into dust.