To be seamless
is not a goal. I’ve got to see
how you stitched together memories
and faces and the name plates
stuck in the dirt next to those blue
flowers. Got to taste
the same kind of apple you would bite
into when we met over the lunch
period. Would dream
of the scent you gave off
when you brushed against me
after school. Top of the ninth
and your mood would be riding on that boy
on the mound—mine affixed
to you by some kind of metal
pins and rawhide twine.
Time to read
a chapter in a novel, watch
a movie start
to finish (without interruption), listen
to anything but
songs from Nirvana’s Nevermind
on the radio. Time to tuck
the tributes, altered memories, grief between
pages of a journal
you’ve been rereading
(without interruption) for two months. Bible
studies will be held
on Sunday evenings in your favorite coffee house.
(He’ll still be dead.)
Those girls will continue to grow.
Sometimes leaves will turn and fall
at the same time.
If I study the word
“long” from every measured angle
I still won’t know what
you meant or felt by those right-slanting
letters. And with you
dead, those secrets will remain secure
inside a locker
I’m not meant to discover. If I do,
I‘ll pretend not to remember
the combination just so you can
teach me about numbers again—
however it is you ghosts
do that sort of thing.
No longer in the run around, she traipses
across an invisible line
between mentor
and visitor, room
and mask, smile
and lie, tears
and truth, lover
and ghost. A new
preoccupation might not be so kind.
If only you had come down
that warm June night.
To rescue her
from his leaping kiss, from
herself—you might have deflected
the obsession
from his visage
to yours. Might have cherished
her beautiful catastrophe
longer than
a summer’s breath. River
to lake—lake to river
bed, you might have left her
another widowed
word in the end.
She doesn’t visit haunted houses.
But for you she might
walk the disappearing
floor boards just to spy the illusion
of you and those insinuations
your eyes and long fingers held
captive for so many years. Creaks
expose only laughter wrapped
around the mystery
of what might have been. If
only those planks had been
longer, straighter,
of sounder wood.
Rabbits and voles whip
across a city sidewalk. Still,
the leaves don’t fall.
I can almost feel the heat
of your tobacco-flavored breath
against my cheek
as you whisper ghostly
nothings in my ear. Still,
the leaves don’t fall.
“One must be receptive, receptive to the image at the moment it appears.”
—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
In moments like these
I do what I do
best—steal.
I see your collage
of sea glass clad the curve
of a clam shell
and raise you a cloth bag
laden with leaves, light
fixtures, planks from bleachers, a pale
pink mannequin
arm, the final words
he whispered before
he left the café at dusk. I see straight
through our trial
to time to be served.
Popo is short
for poor poet
as much as it is
for the police.
“There’s no art
To find the mind’s construction in the face.”
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Black and white is better.
A chance to sing
with the prettiest
soccer player he ever coached is best
between the pipes. The choral
room fades into a late-night debate
séance. A rude awakening—you
were no challenge to her
even before she got so lonely
on her mountain. Did you get your kiss
beside a pile of broken
chairs? Behind another brick
in the wall? Bonfire flames
and umbrella silhouettes
become an unfinished
symphony. The egg
drop comes before those fish drawn
on their foreheads in crayon. You make me long
for the artless construction
of your face.
She’s ready to declare:
I believe
in ghosts. She’s ready
to admit:
I believe in ghosts
so I might encounter you
in the hallway of that haunted
old school building.
If everything could be repurposed,
she’d like to be slate
under your chalk next.
