Earth and Water

Every metaphor wants tribute
In the form of substantial facts,
But only the fact of tribute
Transmigrates, transubstantiates.

Traces of each story are left
Ghostlike in all subsequent tales.
That's what geographers are for,
But we don't need geographers

Anymore. The explanation
Our mind has supplied in the course
Of reading about boundaries
Will have to be enough for us.

I sat on the surrender bench
Watching the lake's waves, half-hoping
To see a selkie's dark, sleek head
Emerge from the snow-shouldered surf,

But I saw nothing, nothing new,
Nothing but the ordinary,
Strangest and hardest to forgive
Implausibility of all.

Or I never sat on that bench.
In fact, I slouched inside my car,
Collecting quotations to maim.
The rest of my memory's truth.

I saw what you might call water
While placed on what you might call earth,
And I was so sad I offered
Tokens of mud for forever.

Dead Cat Bounce

Concepts compete for resources,
For reproduction and survival.
Who would crave a black butterfly
Born too soon during a mild winter?

One soul, divided by grammar,
The synthesis of culture and flesh,
Each instructing and correcting
The other, birthing hypocrisy,

Logic, rationalization,
Immortality, divinity,
Desire as an explanation.
We want to live. We think about death.

Sixteen Letters to Senya

1. Ghost Cave

"Let the poet sing his long, lovely epic; it is still the harried, inarticulate, much beleaguered guy in the white coat who will be cementing the transactions."

Why 'guy'? All right, let that go by.

I live in your home with your ghosts

With no idea, actually, who

You were. Are is too strong a word

For any of us, any genes

Uncemented by transactions

Between the poets in white coats

And the heroes in the aether.

322 5th Avenue,

End of Kildare Lane, New Denver,

British Columbia. We are

Here if ever we're anywhere,

Your Honor. Can we discuss this

Matter of who is entitled

To occupy a dead man's home,

Interloper or ghost himself?

2. Mori Bench

When I spell genes, I don't mean genes
But something like heredity.
It could be yours. It could be ours.

There's a bench with your name on it
And a chair in your former house
That my daughter tumbles out of

Scratching her back. My wife says hi
To you, impromptu, during deep
Meditation by your fireside.

You're around here, somewhere, still, but
I know that, to you, you never,
The world, the universe never

Was, none of it, never will be.
You, memento of another
Age, never were, never will be.

I you if you remember me.

3. Rain on May

In your own life, nothing ever
Comes out of the blue. Take a broom
And sweep the countless green inchworms
Hanging from threads from your fruit trees.

Your daughter, returned, lives next door.
Remember when you flipped breakers
In the basement, switching off heat,
Switching on one bare, lonely light?

That's all right. I'm remembering
For you and me alike in here,
Little closet of English lines,
So unlike your Japanese youth.

On May Day, after weeks of sun,
It rains. Your home remains well-built,
Twenty-odd years after you've gone.
My thoughts are not so watertight.

4. The World, the Other Books, the Mind of the Cartographer

Your daughter greets me as I leave
To crutch up to the big parade,
Relatively speaking, for May Days.
It is raining in the Slocan

Again, and she's wryly cheerful
Standing in her puddled green lawn.
"Going to see the floats, hey?" Yes.
My own daughter's on one of them.

The same when you were mayor,
No doubt. A short parade, a few
Floats, crowd evenly divided
Between friends and kin on the floats,

And friends and kin lining the route.
Every little one is a world
And none of their worlds are little.
Who could map the trails through all this?

5. You and I

Positioning has no regard.
We leave the world. The world leaves us.
I know near nothing about you.
You know nothing about yourself,

Not even your name, the story,
However fragmented, I write
These lovely, hopeless letters to.
Nobody, nothing ever was.

Down by the shores of the deep lake,
An otter rolls under the waves.
My daughter says it's a selkie.
Your daughter says it's a problem.

"Oh, it won't be good if they den
Under the marina. They take
Too many fish and scare the rest."
Senya, are we fish or otters?

6. Hashish to Calm an Old Man's Nerves

Never cared for the stuff, myself.

I have other, wetter, weakness,

Uisge beatha, the Slocan Lake.

Still, I understand old man nerves.

I'll bet you did, too, when you were.

The sun comes out belatedly.

The sun! Enormous, spherical,

Collapsing into helpless fire

All those millions of miles from here.

It doesn't "come out." I know it

Doesn't. It dances the dozens,

Alone with mediocrity,

Small star out on a spiral arm,

And yet the center of all life

In the universe that we know.

Did you ever think on these things?

7. The Studio

"He nods. He nods in a way that I never could--with complete certainty. He nods like someone who doesn't believe in God, but who believes in something that won't give way in the face of accident or disease."

My wife has made a studio

Out of spare tables, the red chair

With your name stenciled on the back

That you had, perhaps, since childhood,

And a couple of folding screens

On your front porch with the north light.

It's a small space, cold when it's cold,

Hot when it's hot, but she likes it

Better than the tranquil bedroom,

Two small windows, one facing east,

One facing the sound of the creek,

Where I like to sit and write you.

I wish I could brush-stroke kanji.

It would feel more literary.

My wife's in the studio now,

And I am at home with a ghost.

8. The Plain Room

Southeast precisely, the corner
Between two white windows.
This is where I imagine you
Would have kept your simple household

Shrine for deities and demons.
On either side, the plain white walls
Divide, recorner, and reform.
The handsome, mature cherry tree

No one fails to recollect when
Remembering you or your house
Embraces both of the windows
With seasons, bud, blossom, fruit, bare.

My wife and I embrace as well,
This cornering moment in space
Where all blank possibilities
Join past to myth, body to soul.

9. Johnny Jump-Ups

I wonder if your daughters ate
The bright little Johnny jump-ups,
Prettiest of weeds, that pop out
Out of your lawn after a rain.

My daughter loves to snack on them,
Cramming their blue purple white gold
Petals as small as her thumbnails
Into her mouth, colored candy,

Healthy as a salad. Mama
Doesn't mind. I don't mind either,
Although it seems like a fairytale
To this polluted 'Jersey boy

That a blonde pixie could walk out
The back door and feast on flowers.
Where I grew up, nothing was safe,
Not the water, not the jump-ups.

10. Cherries in June

Were they ever ripe this early
When they were your trees, your cherries?
It's been sunny for days, dace fry
In the shadows of the shallows,

Glimpses of trout and kokanee
To be had on swims further out,
Darker green cursive signatures
In the golden green, upside down

Sanctuary of the lake. Rain
Finally returns but the fruit
Already bursts from the branches.
My daughter leaps to eat a few.

Yesterday, in a kid's kayak,
She drifted into adventure,
Blown to deep water at evening
When fish leap. I swam to save her.

11. Sun and Games

We had Koko and Paul over for tea.
Koko was struck by how your descendants
Had renovated your little homestead.
Does it still have the Japanese bath? No.

She nodded approvingly at my wife
When told of visitations by your ghost,
Picked a few cherries, peeked into the shed.
It must be maddening to live alone

In a home once your own when you are dead.
We served side dishes of berries and nuts
In pretty porcelain cups, "Made in Japan,"
And gave each other fierce hugs at the end.

Koko is nearing eighty and wants to see
The famous light of Taos and Santa Fe,
Grace of painters twenty hours south of here.
Next day, surprise, you broke our porcelain plates.

12. Hikone Castle

There's one small print of a fortress
On your otherwise bare wall, near
The entertainment cabinet
In the corner of your main room,

Plus lines of fine calligraphy.
My daughter's an enthusiast
Of the flicks of Miyazaki,
As are her parents. We watch them

Together on rainy evenings
Beside the big picture window,
All those cartoon kids and spirits,
Kiki, Ponyo, Totoro.

The fortress lacks a voice-over.
When here, Koko studied the print.
"That's Hikone Castle!" she said,
"Shiga prefecture. I've been there."

13. Compost

Your daughter borrows a pitchfork,
She says to dig a compost hole.
I find this curious but learn
From someone this was your habit.

Instead of creating a pile
Somewhere more or less safe from bears
And later spreading well-turned mulch
Around among your garden plots,

You preferred to dig holes, fill them,
Tamp them, and then, much later, plant
Potted flowers, shrubs, and fruit trees,
Each in its unique compost hole.

I survey your lawn with fresh eyes,
The cherry, plum, and chestnut trees,
The regular clumps of flowers.
A ghost is a habit's own life.

14. Tuesdays

It's got to be coincidence.
Nearly every Tuesday evening
We've spent at your house, some minor
Magic of social happenstance

Converges around your back lawn
Framed by the fruit trees and the creek.
The midsummer sun angles in
Between the banked afternoon clouds

And children appear from nowhere,
Running down the path, bicycling
From town with a mom, play fighting
In the flowers by the back door.

Pensioners wander by with dogs.
The RCMP officer
From next door laughs with his daughter
On his shoulders. This your doing?

15. Giving Us Grief

After midsummer's day had gone,
The past tense gripped the narrative.
The cherries were on the ground; rain
Pounded the roof of your small home
Until the renovated tin
Began to leak reluctantly.
The breakers in your locked basement
Were tripping, one by one, again,

Your daughter off on vacation,
And no one there to let us in.
After Akido, my daughter
And I ate at Cup and Saucer
And watched the lake's long clouds roll in,
Implausibly wintry-hearted.
The hot days would return, immense,
But first someone had to mourn them.

16. Canada Day

It was almost here. June had fled
In a flurry of scurrying
Without really that much to say.
Your daughter, back from Calgary,

The sun back temporarily,
Hanging fire from mountains and clouds,
The end of my daughter's pre-school
Era, everything said almost,

Almost on top of us, almost
Gone as you. But not quite. Not yet.
I decided I shouldn't wait,
That it was time to leave you here,

Before you had really happened.
I like the thought of future ghosts,
Senya. We haunt before we are,
Kotodama; voices make waves.

Here Lies Sir Ender

"The common human impulse
To entertain, even in
A hospital room," obtains.

I am flirting shamelessly
With six forms of disaster,
Abusing body and bank

Accounts while coyly returning
To temporary safety
Each time disaster flirts back.

I'm cheerful on a gurney,
Polite before surgery.
Even in a prisonhouse,

I'm the amiable sort.
If I could be a good host
After giving up the ghost,

That would suit me perfectly.
I'm saying this now so that,
When I finally elope

With disaster, you have this
String of self-deprecating
Chat to remember me by,

In the hope, eventually,
You'll think of genial me
And smile when I haunt your dreams.

Phantom

Noon. The light was dim
Through a clouded scrim
Of birch. Pretty grim
For June. On a whim
Then, humming the hymns

His faith had taught him,
He walked to the rim
Of the falls, the brim
Spilling, the spray limned
With angel's wings, prim

Divinity's slim
Outline between them,
The shapes of her limbs
Gleaming where light skimmed.
The angel said, Swim.

Now Let Us Shout Down Xenophanes

He had a particular
Preoccupation with clouds.
Sun, moon, lightning, shooting stars
Were epiphenomena
Of clouds, moving and burning.
He was less impressed with gods.
We say, "few fragments survive,"

As if his words were pieces
Of his living flesh, as if
He, too, were risible god.
We've taken naturalism
And run with it, can forecast
All sorts of weather quite well,
Have even walked on the moon

(Not, it turns out, burning cloud).
But we're still God-besotted
Despite that, sticking fingers
In our ears, stubborn, chanting
Like kids refusing to hear.
Nyah-nyah-nyah! I can't hear you!
Then off we rush for our guns.

Doesn't matter. Matter does
What matter does and we are
More or less, like clouds, matter.
We arise and we dissolve,
And we mutter about it,
Which makes us atypical
Among the life forms we know,

But we're not happy as such.
We run in rings, singing things
Both true and truly nonsense.
Eeny meeny miny mo,
Catch disaster by the toe.
Soon you'll falter. Soon you'll go.
Eeny meeny miny mo.

For

I live in a world where everyone dies,
And although that's the only salient fact
I've spent most of my life ignoring it.
I've lost my way with a ways still to go,
And now I don't know if I'm going it.

The old, lovely, warm, cedar Harold Bench
With the blank spot where the brass plate had been
Is now completely gone. It's been replaced
By a new, taller, fake-wood and steel bench
With a more informative, brighter plate.

The original bench's plate had
Specified no surname for "memory
Of our son Harold," mysteriously.
Now I know that Harold, for whom this world
Now never existed, was a Bayford,

And I feel less for him, nonexistent,
And nothing for this hideous new bench,
Though clearly it shows someone cared enough
To more carefully commemorate him.
Sun that will never return burns again.

Versipellis

I love I'm aging.
Wish I aged faster.
Aging is shifting
Appearance, escape.
It's not being dead.

It's one step ahead
Of where I used to
Be, no going back.
If you're not aging
You're already dead.

To Meet My Bear

"We're going in the forest.
There's not bears or anything."
Little Charlie, two years old,
Said this to three older boys
At the Barkers' farm in Hills
On the edge of a forest
Home to quite a few black bears.

It was a rainy June day
Just past the summer solstice.
Children visited the farm
In their slickers and Wellies
To feed the chickens, llamas,
Lambs, and goats. Said I, myself,
I'm going in the forest.

Not Now

Once I saw the future and understood
Birdsong. This pleasure existed before

Morality reared its well-bred head. Then
I learned that everything I learned would go,

Including that. I interrupted Death
Itself in the act of copulating,

Which meant my life was forfeit instantly.

To Be Discontinued

I have issues with narrative.
Scientific or not,
Stories have a structure
That feeds us like the saddle clasp

Of hemoglobin molecules,
Delivering the fuel
With which we burn our lives
In precisely bite-sized packets.

Offloaded, stories float away
To go grasp more fearful
Oxygen we can gasp.
Their delivery is perfect

And their content keeps us going,
But there's no difference
Between any intake
Of breath, however desperate,

And any other, first to last.
The message is the same.
Carry on as you were.
Never fear. Back with more later.

Capeche

The origins of humanity
Have not seemed to interest poets much.
We love the how of our perception;
We love the what. We shy from the why,
As we should. When we grow arrogant
Enough to think we can unravel
Our correlations to origins,
We tumble from what we can observe,
From the heaped-up ten thousand things sung,
Down into darkness, understanding.

Under a Sign

What a vague and flexible
Concept a God is,
A trading post for ideas
Where treaties are made

Under one protective sign
That means many things
To the negotiators
And the horse traders

Sheltering their business there.
Occasionally,
A dispute burns a post down,
A post is abandoned

Or besieged, becomes a fort.
Less business gets done
In the palisades' shadow,
But still, some gets done.

It's the desire to transact
But get the better
Of the transaction that makes
God flexible, vague.

Over the Volcano

Death wears a cape from the Sun,
And the Sun throws dark shadows.
Not even a volcano
Will remain a volcano,
Cold plug subducted under.
A healthy mosquito, free
Of human-killing disease

Won't quit begging me be still.
If I am still, her babies
Built of my mammalian blood
Will return to haunt this place
I'm wandering aimlessly,
Will try their luck on deer hides
Or me again, if I'm still

Alive, which seems unlikely.
The abducted minerals
The carious mines have culled,
Various holes in the ground,
Witness the way rock ages
As life dies to break it down,
And the Sun throws dark shadows.

Runners of the Woods

Do our hopes deceive us? Will we ever know?
Snowdrops are enemies to all other flowers
Because they gave away whiteness to the snow.

Matter can compute, can be disappointed
As the moon in a fairytale once composed
By the conjoined material anointed,

By itself, of course, variously, as soul,
Mind, ghost, the thing that lives outside and inside
Alike and not at all, the hole of the whole.

Flitting through the gloomy forests of the brain,
These flowers, moths, inescapable scraps of mist
Escape us and give our brightness to the rain.

Periplus

It's high time I left for the margins.
The law, solemn and absurd, at home
Is that no one escapes or explores

Anymore, unless the emperor
Sends them to the edge of what is known
To chart and plant monuments to power

Exactly where power ceases to be.
I want to slip between the pillars
Raised to mark our empire's boundaries,

Without any grant or permission,
Without anyone knowing
I'm past the point of anything known.

I want to be free to look over
My shoulder, as I vanish inland,
At the emperor's ships in the sea

Still conning the shoreline for some place
To land and claim or reclaim and leave.
If you help me, I'll remember you.

All Day Eddy

Material's mysterious, not mere.
Spirit inheres in it, never leaves it,

Never lives apart from it, but somehow
Arises continually, as if

Whatever is is tasked with producing
Eternally whatever never is.

In Utah, in the Professor Valley,
What's left of the Colorado River

Flows continually, often bearing
Rubber rafts of silly people seeking

Thrills and beauty and something to boast of
Later in an office building somewhere.

The river guides have nicknamed every spot
From wherever they start to Takeout Beach.

One location, slightly less than certain,
But a lot more reliable than rare

Consists of a large, leisurely vortex
Known as All-Day Eddy. If you float in

And don't know how to paddle out,
You could spin in large, slow circles for hours.

Varied materials interacting
Along the way from lower to higher

Entropies generate All-Day Eddy,
The rafts, the rafters, their voices, these words.

Transformation

The captain of the men of death,

Porta fenestella, fate's door,

Opens wide, like a gracious host

And salutes the lost wanderer.

Come in, come in, make yourself home.

So the wanderer does just that,

Becoming at one with the hearth

And the rich, heavy tapestries,

One with the bedroom and the bed.

A little packet of letters

On the nightstand is all that's left

Of the story of the last host.

Fire Shaping

A firecracker makes a bad candle,
A candle a dismal firecracker.
What do you want life for?

I do not imitate others like you do.
I have my own way of imitating things.
I take them.

The Incomplete Tales of Mother Ghost

1. Orfeoyote

"The very bone of my existence,
Knowledge and belief always at war
With each other, since what I know I

Can never manage quite to believe,
And one thing I know is that that's so,
And still I refuse to believe it."

Coyote began to cry because
He didn't know what to do. He tripped
And fell in the river. The current

Carried him away. He sang, "These are
Words to conjure with. Fertility.
Adaptability. Aerobic

Fitness. Disease. I can't come closer
To simple natural selection
Than that." But the fish weren't listening.

Along the shore, the nonexistent
Fairy women hawking on horseback
Included Coyote's kidnapped spouse,

Who couldn't hear him singing either.
"I'm hungry," Coyote sang sweetly.
If you're so clever, eat the river.


2. The Yoke of a Whip-Wielding Ape

The poetic oddity
Sat behind two oxen yoked
To the oddity's success.

A tree, dynamic, frozen,
Computed the power of sun.
The oddity cut it down,

Built a home out of its bones,
And sang songs through the oxen's
Horns by the hearth, counting verse.

The oddity ate and drank,
Shit and pissed like anything,
But edited the latter

Out of its long, heroic
Song about a whip-wielding
Ape who prayed invisibly

Over the bones of oxen
Burned on the bones of the trees,
Eating the fat of the gods.


3. Talking Animals

Search in vain for the parents of us all.
Our progenitors were the ghosts that smoked
Out of the mouths of terrified monkeys

Huddled tightly around one invention,
A pinched little ratchet made of nothing,
Called by later, ghostlier descendants

Various animal names for species
That will never smoke ghost names of their own:
Monkey King, the Serpent, Rat, Soma,

Raven, Coyote, and the rest of them,
The ratchet really being none of them,
Not a trickster but a trick that taught beasts

How to play with fire, weave worms and spiders,
Capture fish, sail across the seven seas,
The sex of reproducing spoken things.


4. The Singing River

Music, too, wanted to remain.
Wandering aimlessly one day
Music bumped into a sad ape

Who had fled back into the woods
From the palace where apes with whips
Serving the Monkey King mocked him.

The ape had sought out Coyote
But Music told him Coyote had fled,
Singing sorry songs for himself,

Far down the river, to the sea.
The sad ape brightened. Coyote
Gone meant an opportunity.

He offered Music a bargain.
Come sing with me and be my love
And I will place you on a throne

And make your bones ivory gods
So that all who sing and play you
Will worship you by doing so,

And I will be your humble priest
Preserving and protecting you,
If only you will come with me

And never abandon the shrines
I will have raised to enshrine you.
Music agreed and the sad ape

Became the first priest, but Music,
Immortal Music, grew restless
And fled the temple every chance

To run with creatures in the woods,
Laughing and dancing foolishly.
One day the priest found out a trick

For cutting Music's heart and soul
Away from Music's ghostly voice,
Which the priest threw in the river.

Ever since, all rivers sing, but
Even those who love their songs know
Temples hold the souls that haunt them.

Standard List of Professions

Foragers and herders have
Plenty of time to observe,
Whether waiting patiently
In a wooded glade for game
Or sitting long hours guarding
Flocks grazing the mountainside.
From them, folktales and lyrics.

Peasants have plenty of time
For planting and harvesting,
For endless, back-breaking chores,
Storing hopes, scaring off crows.
From fall fields, winter firesides,
And dark cellar holes, wonder
Tales, fairies, trolls, and witches.

Priests and their aristocrats
Have plenty of time for death,
Ritual sacrifices,
Blood-letting, off with the heads,
Regicides, intrigues, incest,
Beating the bounds of conquest,
From them, the hymns and epics.

Bureaucrats and scholars have
Plenty of time for failure,
For petty little squabbles
And fantasies of a home
Somewhere in the countryside
Far away from each other.
From them, poems as lists, like this.

Updraft

There is not one fairyland.
There are two, neither of which
Belongs to you, although you
Hang and drift in the weather
Over the borders of each.
In one, only tales are true.
In the other are no tales.

Although you are neither, both
Make claims on you. Part of you
Declares allegiance to one,
Insisting myth dreams the truth
Or only what counts are facts,
But you'll vanish with either
And neither will forgive you.

The Body of the Lake Gives Soul to the Clouds

I am easily misled
By thinking about ourselves.
I see for the first time I
Am not ourselves, not tissues
Such as bone, such as the brain,
That cannot regenerate.
I am themselves, the language

Of the ghosts continually
Coursing through the hosts of us,
Flesh of ourselves to which I
Am tied when I am I, not
When I am the ghosts themselves,
Rising as wisps of fog rise
Off the surface of the lake.

I Don't Mind

All hypotheses need to be tested
Formally, and by whatever methods
Available to keep the interface
Between hungry culture, implacable
World from closing up completely to us.
That's the actual portal that opens
The parallel fairyland of the real
Where events are as they are and never
Only as our whispering, greedy words
Would like to make them mean, to keep us mean.

Live Forever

Like an echo, not the voice, not ever,
Abheder dosh, osteogenesis imperfecta,

The unhappy trait dissipates almost
As quickly as the life projecting it

But not quite. Echo, echo, echo, no
More echo. The shout itself had perished

Even as the first weak effort returned.
In theory, a happy trait, however,

Could live for good as forever, a trick
For perpetuating self through dying

Instantiations, how to make blood food,
How to bind the energy of the light,

How to make a sound between tongue and mouth
That means everything that ever there was

Will return, faintly and more faintly, then
In memory, then never home again.

Anthrodependent Commensals

All of time, thus this universe,
Is aperiodic crystal,
Structured, never repeating, but

Chiming long-range correlations.
The wolves' crystalline DNA
Shading into the feral dogs

Dependent on the garbage dump,
The African cats becoming
English biddies' dozing moggies,

The bacterial free riders
Dividing their undivided
Attentions to the byproducts

Of an outbreak species of ape
Until, lateral gene transfers
Aiding them, they become the homes

Their hosts share with them. All of time
Illustrates its passing in all
Phenomena; everything rhymes

And nothing is ever the same.

Peine forte et dure

When time rhymes we call it space,

A run of changes that seem

Sufficiently similar

To be one thing, one building,

One landscape, one character,

Only, of course, slightly changed.

Nothing slight about that change.

Gradually it presses us,

While we resist, refusing

To admit nothing's a thing,

Laboring to our last breath,

Wheezing out, "more weight, more weight."

There never was a timeless

Instant, never was a thing.

Lithobolia

A lot of stories used to start
With "once" or "once upon a time,"
But now we're not so confident.

A lot of stories still begin
By assuming we'll surrender
Common sense, facts, experience,

The knowledge death's a certainty,
To indulge in certain nonsense,
Fairies, monsters, mythology.

We excuse this by claiming truth
Of a metaphorical sort
Exists within our fantasies,

Although we can never explain
Why we would need to recode truth
As libraries of balderdash.

A lot of stories never start
Because we already know them.
Let me, who is without sin, cast

The first stone.

Rules Are Written from Below

Kindness never goes far toward
Dislodging the unwelcome guest.
So the farmers decided
To kill the boy in the darkness.

Wind fueled the flames in the ruins.
From two o'clock the storm increased.
Even the ships in the river
Were sunk and their moorings with them.

In the process of this story
That arrived when there was nothing
To worry about anymore,
The boy killed the farmers instead.

First Yfound and Forth Ybrought

I tested time, divinity, and death,
Asking each abstraction which could best
Acquit itself of any existence

Other than a given sequence of rules
Spontaneously derived from the fields
Of games minor living things had bounded.

I am the apocalypse I survived.
Of course I believe in ghosts--in ghosts, ghosts,
And holy ghosts. All of culture is ghosts,

Their parallel world prancing and hawking
Within, beside the bodies occupied
With making more and more ghosts all the time.