5
There is a creek that curves past the Rose Funeral Home carrying dusk
& oil & pieces of purple light & soggy leaves from plane trees.
How are you not seeing this?
The current is here outside the fourth story in the sycamores. A clear &
different air that does not match up to our thought.
How are you not seeing this?
It’s a sense, a premonition. The shape you think you see
in a hospital chair. The one you stand outside of.
This still, it doesn’t exist.
The branches lifting darkness, shadow, flickering.
How are you not seeing this?
We belong in the room, a small cult,
amateurs & connoisseurs of suffering, we are at home among.
How are you not seeing this?
6
I got off the train for a few moments. I don’t know why.
I am late for the present now. Broken umbrella in the trash.
Who gets off a train to look at a poster?
Dilapidated station. The only way out, to wake on the platform.
Fred still dead.
7
Dear ghost, Sweet, the clouds,
ghost ships, tar, bakery shop, the past, nostalgia, its most valuable cargo by far.
Wait for the spirit to move you, to rise from the objects like monks gathered around a fire in a trash drum,
snapping sticks. Understand how hard it is to attend to that first spark.
The light in the trees the temperature of Autumn.
Dear ghost, you point out the obvious, elegantly, with almost all of your enormous heart.
Every morning, bronze in branches, silver on the other side of Summer.
Why not, like that, we say, why not like that. The leaves curl like insects, spiral toward the stars.
Something is loose in the body, unhinged, too large, too dark a shape.
Explains this feeling of being unfinished.
In the town, it is early, the leaves rustle & crumble. Earlier, children rolled plastic hoops in full sunlight.
I possess the selfsame heart. It was broken. It mended. It was broken. Now it is simply in disarray.
The laundry, fragrant with lemon, floats, in the first backyard that is visible, like ghosts.
Dear ghost,
8
let green light lie on the leaves emptied of the past.
I believe the lake deepened to green, in my memory.
Night, black fires, shimmered in the distance, you would recall.
Night, black fires, neither one of us wished to enter.