O Ghosts

[Image: “You Don’t Stumble on Ghosts,” a so-called “newspaper blackout poem” by user mawstools (Meri Aaron Walker) on Flickr. (Click to enlarge.) Used under a Creative Commons license. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Spirit Birds

The spirit world the negative of this one,
soft outlines of soft whites against soft darks,
someone crossing Broadway at Cathedral, walking
toward the god taking the picture, but now,
inside the camera, suddenly still. Or the spirit
world the detail through the window, manifest
if stared at long enough, the shapes of this
or that, the lights left on, the lights turned off,
the spirits under arcs of sycamores the gray-gold
mists of migratory birds and spotted leaves recognize.

Autumnal evening chill, knife-edges of the avenues,
wind kicking up newspaper off the street,
those ghost peripheral moments you catch yourself
beside yourself going down a stair or through
a door — the spirit world surprising: those birds,
for instance, bursting from the trees and turning
into shadow, then nothing, like spirit birds
called back to life from memory or a book,
those shadows in my hands I held, surprised.
I found them interspersed among the posthumous pages

of a friend, some hundreds of saved poems: dun
sparrows and a few lyrical wrens in photocopied
profile perched in air, focused on an abstract
abrupt edge. Blurred, their natural color bled,
they’d passed from one world to another: the poems,
too, sung in the twilit middle of the night, loved,
half-typed, half-written-over, flawed, images
of images. He’d kept them to forget them.
And every twenty pages, in xerox ash-and-frost,
Gray Eastern, Gold Western, ranging across borders.

(Stanley Plumly [source])

…and:

I don’t believe that ghosts are “spirits of the dead” because I don’t believe in death. In the multiverse, once you’re possible, you exist. And once you exist, you exist forever one way or another. Besides, death is the absence of life, and the ghosts I’ve met are very much alive.

(Paul F. Eno [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Ghosts

It’s Mr. Brown looking much better
Than he did in the morgue.
He’s brought me a huge carp
In a bloodstained newspaper.
What an odd visit.
I haven’t thought of him in years.

Linda is with him and so is Sue.
Two pale and elegant fading memories
Holding each other by the hand.
Even their lipstick is fresh
Despite all the scientific proofs
To the contrary.

Is Linda going to cook the fish?
She turns and gazes in the direction
Of the kitchen while Sue
Continues to watch me mournfully.
I don’t believe any of it,
And still I’m scared stiff.

I know of no way to respond,
So I do nothing.
The windows are open. The air’s thick
With the scent of magnolias.
Drops of evening rain are dripping
From the dark and heavy leaves.
I take a deep breath; I close my eyes.

Dear specters, I don’t even believe
You are here, so how is it
You’re making me comprehend
Things I would rather not know just yet?

It’s the way you stare past me
At what must already be my own ghost,
Before taking your leave,
As unexpectedly as you came in,
Without one of us breaking the silence.

(Charles Simic [source])

…and:

The [philosopher, Jesuit priest, and] paleontologist Teilhard [de Chardin] carried a notebook in which he had written, among other things, a morning prayer: “Be pleased yet once again to come down and breathe a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter with which this day the world is to be freshly clothed.” The realm of loose spirit never interested Teilhard. He did not believe in it. He never bought the view that the world was illusion and spirit alone was real. He had written in his notebook from a folding stool in the desert of the Ordos, “There are only beings, everywhere.”

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

An ICF was an Imaginary Childhood Friend, those pretend friends one sometimes has when a child. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t go away when no longer required; they simply wander the earth until their host dies. They share common DNA with fictional people like the Wingco in that they are constructs of the human mind — living stories, if you like. Because of this they are quite visible to fictional people and, on occasion, to us as something normally dismissed as “ghosts” or “a trick of the light.”

(Jasper Fforde [source])

…and:

Daniel

On the day we moved in, the pings, bumps, and snaps
Were scary, it’s true, but probably normal;
A house accepting new patterns of weight
With protest, the way no conviction goes gently.
We laughed a little, and called it “our spirit.”

Later that night, when the power conked out
And the kids were crying, the ghost got a name,
“Daniel,” and a history of whispered exploits,
All of them harmless, like nursery rhymes,
Or like the little fibs we tell ourselves
To explain why this or that has led to suffering.

Pretty soon, we were using him for everything.
When the Christmas tree fell, it was “Daniel”;
When my wife lost her ring, it was “Daniel”;
When the kids forgot to feed the goldfish
And it turned up dead, its eyes silvered over
Like water shadowed under sheets of ice,

Well, that became Daniel too, which was curious;
And pauses me now as I make the long walk
Down the hall to the bathroom in darkness,
And hear, in soft concert, the sound of my footfalls
Answered at once by my children’s voices

Still calling to Daniel behind their door.

(David Orr [source])

_________________

About the image: I’d never heard of newspaper blackout poems before finding this image. They’re apparently a “thing,” invented by Austin Kleon (who has published a book of and maintains a blog devoted to them). For a reasonable introduction to the idea, including links to Kleon’s work, see this post at bitrebels.com. In the case of the image above, the resulting found poem (“You Don’t Stumble on Ghosts”) reads:

You don’t stumble on ghosts
scratching haiku into business cards.

Instead, you get lost among parishioners
drinking at the town bar.

You discover mutually devoted twins,
then flee again.

People are not haunted by ghosts
in search of beautiful bridges to leap off,
dead children, usually beautiful memories.

Worse things than monsters populate this region:
Indian casinos, retail outlets and large yellow hissing
street-cleaners, people driven mad by disease,
marriage, impulsive romantic partners.

Who hasn’t been stained with a sense of dislocation,
desire and a thousand-page book describing everything
you may not like?

Please enjoy yourselves while you can!

[back to top]