Come on All You Ghosts (3 page)

I remember the house

where I first lived, it was

small and wooden

and next door to a loud

friendly catholic family

whose three sons Andy

and something and something

else constantly with mysterious

lack of effort flicked

an orange basketball

through a rusty hoop

and one afternoon taught

me
duh.
Once

a car screeched and hit

a girl whose name

I just remembered Julia!

We weren't there

but came running out,

it was quiet and we stood

a little away from the man

from the car who stood

over her, there was

a dark spot on her leg,

it was broken, she was fine.

But they decided to limit

the danger by making

the street one way

with a speed limit of 30.

Who were they?

Since then they have been

here looking over

my shoulder, sometimes

taking care, at others

making the wrong decisions

leading to more bad things.

There's no way

to talk about it

except maybe right now.

Now when I look

at photographs of me

and the twins I hear

the green glass beads

separating my bedroom

from theirs clicking in my mind,

is that a memory? Or

what I know those

sorts of beads sound like

in a breeze? Every day

one block up to Connecticut Ave.

and over to Oyster

Bilingual where I sometimes

was asked to stand

in front of the class and hold

up the picture of a duck

or a house when the teacher

said the words in Spanish

and English both. I played

Santa in the Christmas play

which made sense.

One day Luis stabbed

another kid with a pencil

in the throat, he was also fine.

Another day I went to visit

a friendly girl and ran

straight through the plate glass

window in her apartment building

lobby and out the door

and home, my parents

never knew, I was as I would

now say unscathed. Soon

after we moved to Maryland

where the new Catholics

were threatened and mean,

but that's a different story

I don't yet remember.

I think once a parent dies

the absence in the mind

where new impressions would

have gone is clear, a kind

of space or vacuum related memories

pour into, which is good.

from a book I was reading about

a dead architect I saw not the fabulous

empty pale blue almost white desert

sky above the brand new sewage

treatment plant. Nor my handwriting

in which I had thankfully never written

with a huge glowing made of fire

finger stellar advertisements for starlight

in the sky. Just a few artificial contrails

made by jets on their way to Denver

for me with my eyes to follow,

fading like the thought that had made

me raise my face to catch them

at all. Now only the pure white drug

interdiction blimp tethered to a bristling

radar installation remains, scanning

the sixty or so miles between here

and the border for movement dispositive

of a human trying to survive. Goodbye

Robert Creeley, you died looking out

over the plains. No more will

your fractured days emerge for us

to live a little while in, though we have

your collected poems of which

there are many. And farewell Kenneth

Koch, whom I also never met.

Reading his kaleidoscopes causes me

to wonder if perhaps he is not

a lawn chair, knocked over last night

by a pack of javelina that scared

Richard awake and made him wander

to his table, still half asleep. Or

a blue telephone, waiting in the forest

to ring. This book you are holding

is about dying, as will be the next one

upon which you lay your hands.

Thank you for listening. Now let us

all go separately into the city and forget

everything but our little prescriptions.

Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world

is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep

their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful scarred

waitress who wears typewriter keys as a necklace. They jingle

when she brings them drinks. Outside the giant plate glass windows

the planes are completely covered in snow, it piles up on the wings.

I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. Each of the various

faiths of our various fathers keeps us only partly protected. I don't

want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep

I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces

of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings.

I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike

on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.

I woke this morning to the sound of a little voice

saying this life, it was good while it lasted, but I just

can't take it any longer. I'm going to stop shaving

my teeth and chew my face. I'm going to finish inventing

that way to turn my blood into thread and knit

a sweater the shape of a giant machete and chop

my head right off. The leaves had a green

aspect, all their faces turned down towards the earth.

This is exactly how I wanted to act, but I didn't

know where the little voice had hidden, and anyway

who talks like that? What a loss, another tiny

brilliant mind switched off by that same big boring finger.

Clearly life is a drag, by which I mean a net that keeps

pulling the most unsavory and useful boots we

either put on lamenting, or eat with the hooks of some

big idea gripping the sides of our mouths and yanking them

upward in a conceptual grimace. Said the little voice,

that is. I was just half listening, one quarter wondering

what the little park the window looked onto was named,

and one quarter thanking the war I knew was somewhere

busy returning all those limbs to their phantoms.

My neighbors, my remnants, in what have you chosen

to bury your heads? Shadow, said one mote

in an auditorium after a lecture. Some

archive explorer had just finished discussing

a group of islands. Inside me for a while

a tribe had theorized purely and wrongly

its location merely on the basis of tides. I was

feeling extinct, and wishing for a sudden

totally silent sliding out from the wall of twenty

or so very excellent beds so we the audience

could together engage in further collective

dreaming. I would describe that lecturer's voice

as twilight shadow smeared origami cloudlet

but the historical ceiling gilded by the names

of agreed-upon great thinkers is a beautiful dowager

making her sleepy wishes into dimness

soon to retire gracefully known. I hear soft

seventies cell phone songs. Come home

those who love a librarian aspect. I am one,

for give her time and she will answer any question

no matter how spiral, no matter how glass,

so slow to judgment you can sit among her

like a reading room and read and think

until the docents come, they move as trained,

as trained they place a careful hand on our shoulder.

The door locks automatically but not before

wind slips in to do its research on blackness

which gets even blacker, on the fabulous black

dust intercom orchard of what happens

when people fall asleep in their dreams and dream

what they are. Have I mentioned lately

I have been reading a book about a steam powered

carriage we are actually in moving slowly

through the countryside towards the kingdom

and its ruined citizens? Have I mentioned tonight

we shall both stand before the enormous spiral

of wrecking balls in a dress made of laughing glass?

The wind made a little movement

as if it were trying to reassemble.

I looked up from my affidavit. Sometimes

my life feels taped, and quiet evenings

I listen back. I hear the humming of the car

and through the windshield see the road

twisting down a series of cliffs to a very small

blue ocean that like the placid eye

of a beast that regarded our lives without

any desire to eat them grew larger

and stared a little past us, absently

flecked with gold. I would like now to believe

I felt like a leaf. Each night I told

my brother and sister ever more fabulous

stories about far away humanoid beings

with ordinary loves and concerns

swept up into galactic battles for peace

in which the dark forces

with their superior weapons and numbers

were always defeated by a ragtag company

led by slightly better versions of us. No one

ever asked where we were going.

It was all very clear without anyone

saying the dunes and the sea

would never hurt us. Every morning

I opened my eyes so gently I hardly

noticed the difference. Before I was even

awake I would already be flying

a Japanese kite, or sitting underneath

my favorite tree, biting my nails. Perhaps

I am still not supposed to say

advanced translucent beings with the spirits

of animals walked among us. Light

brushed their human hair and cast

their shadows across the tree trunks

or our faces among our games. Someone

was always strumming a guitar with a bird

made of pearl inlaid at the edge of the sound hole

and singing a tune about how helpful

most people are, especially strangers.

Dear sociologists, I have been asked to explain poetry to you. Thus

in the offices of dazed lute press the clicking begins. Lately

we've been conducting field experiments into our private thoughts. One

faction next to the soul shaped watercooler wonders whether

there's any reason at all to remember the feeling of being a child. Is

it best to imagine oneself again beneath the desk as the rusted

air raid siren explodes with its bi-monthly ritual Wednesday afternoon

fear distribution? Like you I was always holding particular crayons

in the dimness of certain morning assemblies. I have been told

some of you think the only constant is constant observation. I know

city planners designed the city and still there are diffusionists who pace

the deep blue edge of do you know you can never try to discover

why why flowers in the cubicles. Between you and me the buildings

also have a space for the sparrow named never who does not sing

yes the cities die when you leave them, yes no one cares what you do.

The glass covered in dust windows of the thrift store display

a mirror from the 1920s. If you take it it will no longer regard young

lovers with important thoughts pushed towards the mighty river. I

will fall in love exactly about a million times and then I will die. Clouds

playing dominos agree. At Everest on Grand someone eats yak discussing

the endless undeclared war among the neutral provinces. Long

metallic articulated girders cast thin shadows over thousands of windows.

A photograph of a pacifist smiles. He wore a white suit, was a friend

to the poor and worked for the union of unemployed telegraph workers

who listen for signals pulsing as Joni Mitchell never said from the heart of

a distant star. He was like my grandfather, after he died the city fathers

did not know what they were building when they built a museum

to encase a window in a wall brought from a far away country where

it once overlooked the sea. Evenings through giant speakers people listen

to troubled sounds whales bounce off continental shelves. Go tell

everyone everything is related, the rich own the clouds, and you can

always locate yourself with so many shadows to instruct you.

Sometime around 11 p.m. the you I was thinking of

left my head. I was in bed, among my white ten billion

thread count cotton sheets. The pillowcases cradled

my head like the earth a very young carrot.

This very white moment of being alone without

any loneliness I ruled and was ruled by like a benevolent

dictator full of human feelings he manages each day

to actualize for the benefit of his people. He feels

very protective about their souls. To him they seem

to be either tiny milagros in the form of boots

or horses made of pounded flat silver, like the pieces

in the homemade board game that glowed

the way they did just a little when it was his turn

as a child to choose which would represent him,

or small blue aspersions cast like the outside

part of an innocent candle flame that does not burn

your finger if you move it very quickly across.

This moment will never return. You were gone,

for a while I heard crickets and some kind of bird

doing something there is probably a word for between

hooting and whistling. Then the train, which despite

all those songs is not very mysterious at all.