Medium in the Morning
I have been sleeping strangely—
I've been living with
a song, that on and off
vibrates me like a beehive—
head on the floor—I hear
the flood of kazoos, dead people
doing their morning or evening
washing. Whatever
it is down there. I hear
the tinny singing of the spirits
and long for, I don't know
exactly what—a new geranium,
something red, something I can't
take my eyes off of—you know,
how they tell you to balance:
pick one spot to fixate on.
They say I live like Gemini,
the twins, or Rhodes—one leg
in this world, one slung over
into the next. I ride a bad,
bad horse. I'm so tired
of being vital, of herding
the mothers and the widows.
Gaslight murders my stomach.
Like all armies, the dead
march there, gobbling up
my perfume, the weather,
the communion of the saints—
What wafer-thin things
their children are, conceived
in this life, born in the next,
toddling without lungs.
Their insides are black as the cores
of old apples, pistol shine,
my eyes in the kitchen window
washing up, saying, what art thou
doing today? Then I wipe
away the tea leaves, and try again.
Medium on the Dietary Habits of the Dead
What ghosts eat: slippers.
Static. The relative unevenness
of staircases. Migraine aura.
Trump cards. Delicate children.
Smooth flat stones. Fruits candied,
dried or desiccated. The recently
mated. Zygotes you can pop
like a grape. Bundles of skirt
unmended. Dishcloth carrying
the crumbs and blood
of daily meals. Odd forsakenness.
Metal toys. Rust and Rustoleum.
Soft toys gone mealy under
many a sweaty hand. How much
I miss, my mother. My mother.
Flags ripped apart by wind. The dirt
around the crater where my daughter
was not born.
Suicide Ghost
Death is not a precise activity.
Just aim in the general
direction. Then there,
you've got it. Got what?
Nothing. That's about right.
Almost right. It's almost right
and straight on until
morning, though nothing
is thereafter straight. I have
a vision now of one of those
cats that mummified,
stuck behind the pipe organ,
going for that one eternal
mouse. No one thinks
they're going to become
a stray leather purse, an easily
mistakable grocery bag,
damp and flattened
in the outer lots where,
I have heard it said,
the women circle.
We want to call everything
planetary, but really
there's much more cosmic
dust—debris, you could say.
But that implies that there
was something there before,
something whole, now blown
apart—very often I held a piece
of glass in my hand,
and licked it, started
to curl my flesh
around it, just to the point
of blood. I do not know,
I never did, what the hell any
human heart was ever doing.
