To Remember the Wanting
 
The past, which only exists in memory,
becomes something less than it used to be
 
when the only person who could be said
to have been there with you dies. Ghosts
 
may inhabit places that remain pretty much
what they were, but they can’t stay the same,
 
after. They are doomed, or perhaps blessed,
to become what we need them to be.
 
That’s not to say we don’t wish they could
be the same. Though of course nobody is,
 
ever, unchanged. Still, the gulf between
who someone was alive and who they are
 
dead is the distance light covers after traveling
forever. Which is to say, the link between
 
remembering an event and the only person
you told about it is frayed and always about to rip.
 
At any moment. A ghost might want to take you back
to a time they were alive. Say a particular night
 
in a dive bar in a college town in Ohio
with a couple of beer-stained, worn pool tables
 
and a beat-up jukebox with rock and roll
mingled with country songs and one or two
 
Sinatra classics someone would play more
than once every night you were there. The night
 
either the ghost or you told the story of
another night and a woman sleeping off
 
too much drinking in the bed that either
the ghost or you were supposed to be asleep in
 
rather than sitting awake in the typical stiff
hotel chair. It no longer matters whether it was
 
you or the ghost in that awkward chair.
Whoever it was told the other the story,
 
and no one else. It was the woman’s hip bones
that you or the ghost couldn’t forget, how
 
they seemed to hum a music like no music
either of you had ever heard out of a jukebox
 
in some filthy, worn-out bar just before closing.
The hymn that woman’s sultry hip bones sang
 
was a tune the ghost hums with you, harmonizing
without even having to think. Both of you
 
know that hymn by heart. You’ve both been
humming it, alive and dead, for as long
 
as you can remember. Music, it turns out,
is one thing ghosts are better at than the living,
 
who can too easily forget a note or drop a beat
and never miss it. Just keep going, we say.
 
Ghosts know how absurd that is. Not to
mention they have a sense of time we are
 
too easily distracted to be able to lay claim to.
This fragile connection — far more delicate
 
than even the hip bones of a woman who’s dead
to the world in someone else’s hotel room
 
with her silk blouse riding up to expose her
concave belly and those hips which have
 
given rise to a hymn that a ghost and someone
who remembers the ghost hum in harmony
 
in a way that can only be imagined — between
the dead and the living frays over time. So much
 
we want to hold is lost. The best we can hope to do
is to remember the wanting. Ghosts don’t
 
do as well with memory as they do with music.
They can work out the harmony of any tune
 
the living come up with, and can curl up
against the alluring hip bones of a sleeping woman
 
and shiver with something they can’t remember
is longing. But in being dead they begin to
 
lose the past. That kind of time they can’t hold onto.
It has something to do with the flesh, probably.
 
Being in it. The only past the dead end up being
able to reside in is the past we make up
 
and place them in. With us. And we are,
let’s not forget, unreliable. Memory is
 
a selective process. A fiction that has no urge
to tell the truth. No matter how much
 
any ghost might want to lay claim to the story
of one particular night in a bar or a hotel room,
 
all they can do is hum the harmony of a music
they have to wait for us to begin humming.
 
The only past they have is the past we remember.
And we need the almost imperceptible
 
humming of ghosts, sometimes, to remind us
what we need to not let go of. It’s complicated,
 
this obscure connection we have with the past
in which the dead are still alive enough

to wake up a sleeping woman and dance with her
to a music they hum together in perfect harmony.
 
They take turns making up lyrics about how
it’s always been time that’s made it so we can
 
dance and want to hold on to one another.
 

Thoughts on the Textual Attributes of Weather
 
This morning, an insistence of geese. First
      on a cobblestone chimney,
then honking past my window under a sky so gray
      it could be a prayer.
Could that be what the geese are
      as they seem to
vibrate the air they cut through?
      Or is it just the rain
they’re bemoaning? How it slants so
      in the chill wind, making
it seem they have to fly through italics,
      as if what the rain has
to say needs to be emphasized. What is
      longed for should be
in italics, after all, though that’s different
      from what’s needed. It can be
hard to articulate one from the other.
      The geese, to be sure, are
Canadian, though where they were born
      isn’t why. It’s a question
of species, not origin. Though we like to claim
      origin is important, it isn’t
really able to stay with us in the way
      so many these days
like to believe. And, let’s face it, where we are
      headed ends up having
more influence on us. Rilke argued,
      in the Duino Elegies,
knowing we’re dying lets us love. I don’t
      know what the geese might
love. But this sudden fog I can hear
      them honking through,
as if in another world, could be
      obscure enough to hide anything,
even something as impossible to know
      as love. And now the rain
isn’t italicized, the wind having died down.
      And the supplications
of the geese from somewhere off in the fog
      could be a longing
diminished enough by the parentheses of so much
      moisture in the air
that nothing for now is clear at all.
 

Thoughts on the Bliss of Good Jazz and the Pain of Grass
 

 A concerto of tongues in other mouths
      and the recently risen sun,
a glare — a trumpet discovering the jazz
      it fits best — in the rear-view
mirror, form a collage that could be titled
      An Ecstasy of Angels. Maybe
it’s a dance, instead, which light
      and tired flesh take up
that’s only missing the music
      necessary to be sure
how they’re supposed to move. Nothing
      like a classic ballroom
dance. Still, grace is involved, and light
      always leads. Everything
is either a dance or a question
      of position, of where it is
you’re supposed to be at a particular time.
      Or where you are
headed. Take a train depot
      barely still a place
where a train pulls in. Limitation
      is a lesson in fear,
or regret, and loss can pull us
      up off our derrieres
to dance to the music of sirens.
      The sirens might turn out
to be the ambulance rushing the woman
      whose tongue in your mouth
put Mozart to shame to the hospital.
      Consider how the fragrance
of just-cut grass, a scent you cherished
      as a kid when you were
mowing lawns to earn money you spent
      on everything
from records to cheap beer you paid
      a homeless guy
to go in and buy for you, that perfume
      another woman would
smell of after she’d made love
      with you, how
it turns out that aroma was the grass
      screaming as it was cut.
The way you want to mourn the loss
      of every lover, to scream
their names as an early morning train
      pulls out of a sad depot
to cover your scream, to keep
      the names yours alone,
so you can go back in and put on
      the Dizzy Gillespie album
you don’t want to love, though
      you do, and pull
a half-asleep woman out of bed
      and dance with her
to music that could make angels swoon.