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Come on All You Ghosts Page 2
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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.
As I Cross the Heliopause at Midnight, I Think of My Mission
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.
Lamp Day
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.
Poem for Hannah
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.
Dobby’s Sweatshirt
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.
The New Lustration
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 pla
cing
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.
Never to Return
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.
II
Together Yet Also Apart
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.
They
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.
Looking Up
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.
April Snow
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