I'm Picking Your Brain for Things You Forgot

Scenes of My Father's Ghost

I.
My father’s ghost lived behind my eyelids 
between the hours of eight pm. and eight am. 
from the time I was nine years old.

Once the sun rose, 
his ghost preferred 
to reside in the crawlspace 
at the corner of my room.

He came about in dreams,
 relentless in his accusations 
with unkind words
 that cut into the dark air 
of my imaginings.

“Why”, I asked,
“did you die?”

A doctor enters, interjects:
“Well you see, he could have lived.
 We have the technology. But 
we didn’t know that then. We’ve worked
 with many cases like your father’s. 
They’re all fine now. 
Sorry.”

My father reappears:

“Well, I didn’t die. I faked my death.”

Then I would wake. 
The sun was up, my father’s ghost 
would slink to the far end of the room,
 not to be seen until
 the following night.

After some time, this all became
 less frequent. The doctors disappeared and I would not set foot in a hospital 
for at least seven years.

Once he came to my sister
 as she slept on a trampoline 
in my aunt’s backyard, 
the indian summer 
warm in her hair.
He extended an apology, 
told her everything would 
be fine, then dissipated 
once again.


II.

My father’s ghost 
is a blooming wildflower 
off the crags 
of a lonely mountain.

My father’s ghost 
slipped in through 
the floorboards 
of a creaking cottage 
to watch an old man
 dream on his deathbed.

My father’s ghost 
is separate from the body. 
In fact, it has never once 
been to Virginia, 
nor is it interested 
in visiting.

My father’s ghost 
remembers the fall
, sleeps through winter,
 and often 
forgets the spring. 


My father’s ghost aches 
in the hot months, 
recalling its first 
lonely summer
 after life.

My father’s ghost 
never inhabited a cat,
 but watched 
with moderate pleasure 
as my mother and sister
 once called to a stray
where they thought 
he may reside.

seasons

the headlines read today
someone caught a fugitive line
that was something like:
"but the sea is too far to swim"

it crawled out of the slop
in a world war trench
slinked up the ditch
like an amoeba sprouted legs
to up and leave the ocean
through and through
like the development
of skeletal structure
calcification of the first bone
a ring in the marrow
the tone of dispossession
which resides between keys
somewhere before your voice
meets mine

today my tears roll on
like the back hills of pennsylvania
that time we tricked sunday
and our eyes glazed sedate
off the sounds of synthesized
billboard hits and brown gravy
a hole in our brains
bigger than a bread box
torn off the residual effects
of engineered epiphanies
and i asked in twenty questions
if it was magic

we piled stones and whispered
in the waterfall's shadow