Read Come on All You Ghosts Online

Authors: Matthew Zapruder

Come on All You Ghosts

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for my father and Sarah

I

Erstwhile Harbinger Auspices

Erstwhile means long time gone.

A harbinger is sent before to help,

and also a sign of things

to come. Like this blue

stapler I bought at Staples.

Did you know in ancient Rome

priests called augurs studied

the future by carefully watching

whether birds were flying

together or alone, making what

honking or beeping noises

in what directions? It was called

the auspices. The air

was thus a huge announcement.

Today it's completely

transparent, a vase. Inside it

flowers flower. Thus

a little death scent. I have

no master but always wonder,

what is making my master sad?

Maybe I do not know him.

This morning I made extra coffee

for the beloved and covered

the cup with a saucer. Skeleton

I thought, and stay

very still, whatever it was

will soon pass by and be gone.

Aglow

Hello everyone, hello you. Here we are under this sky.

Where were you Tuesday? I was at the El Rancho Motel

in Gallup. Someone in one of the nameless rooms

was dying, slowly the ambulance came, just another step

towards the end. An older couple asked me

to capture them with a camera, gladly I rose and did

and then back to my chair. I thought of Paul Celan,

one of those poets everything happened to

strangely as it happens to everyone. In German

he wrote he rose three pain inches above the floor,

I don't understand but I understand. Did writing

in German make him a little part of whoever

set in motion the chain of people talking who pushed

his parents under the blue grasses of the Ukraine?

No. My name is Ukrainian and Ukranians killed everyone

but six people with my name. Do you understand

me now? It hurts to be part of the chain and feel rusty

and also a tiny squeak now part of what makes

everything go. People talk a lot, the more they do

the less I remember in one of my rooms someone

is always dying. It doesn't spoil my time is what

spoils my time. No one can know what they've missed,

least of all my father who was building a beautiful boat

from a catalogue and might still be. Sometimes I feel him

pushing a little bit on my lower back with a palm

made of ghost orchids and literal wind. Today

I'm holding onto holding onto what Neko Case called

that teenage feeling. She means one thing, I mean another,

I mean to say that just like when I was thirteen

it has been a hidden pleasure but mostly an awful pain

talking to you with a voice that pretends to be shy

and actually is, always in search of the question

that might make you ask me one in return.

Schwinn

I hate the phrase “inner life.” My attic hurts,

and I'd like to quit the committee

for naming tornadoes. Do you remember

how easy and sad it was to be young

and defined by our bicycles? My first

was yellow, and though it was no Black

Phantom or Sting-Ray but merely a Varsity

I loved the afternoon it was suddenly gone,

chasing its apian flash through the neighborhoods

with my father in vain. Like being a nuclear

family in a television show totally unaffected

by a distant war. Then we returned

to the green living room to watch the No Names

hold our Over the Hill Gang under

the monotinted chromatic defeated Super

Bowl waters. 1973, year of the Black Fly

caught in my Jell-O. Year of the Suffrage Building

on K Street NW where a few minor law firms

mingle proudly with the Union of Butchers

and Meat Cutters. A black hand

already visits my father in sleep, moving

up his spine to touch his amygdala. I will

never know a single thing anyone feels,

just how they say it, which is why I am standing

here exactly, covered in shame and lightning,

doing what I'm supposed to do.

Automated Regret Machine

My friend and I were watching television

and laughing. Then we saw

white letters begin to crawl along

the bottom of the screen.

People were floating on doors and holding

large pieces of cardboard

with telephone numbers scrawled

in black fear up to the helicopters.

The storm had very suddenly

come and now it was gone.

I saw one aluminum rooftop flash

in sunlight, it would have burned

the feet of anyone trying to wait there.

My friend by then had managed

to will her face into that familiar living

detachment mask. I thought

of the very large yellow house

of the second half of my childhood, how through

my bedroom window I could reach my hand

out and upward and touch

the branch of an elm. At night

in the summer I heard the rasp

of a few errant cicadas whose timing

devices had for them tragically drifted.

And the hoarse glassy call

of the black American crow.

Though I am at least halfway through

my life, part of my spirit

still lives there, thinking very soon

I will go down to the room where my father

carefully places his fingers on the strings of the guitar

he bought a few years before I was born.

Picking his head up he smiles

and motions vaguely with his hand, communicating

many contradictory things.

Poem (for Grace Paley)

People say they don't understand poetry.

Meaning how must we proceed. Be extremely

tempered. Dream a careful dream. People

say we're living a quiet life, lost in a forest

of pronouns, asleep for a thousand years.

People said his wife passed through him

an arrow made of smoke. People say whatever

you do don't hitch a ride on a sepulcher.

People said it was the future then, and we

liked falling into mirrors. People said

we were never sorry we couldn't travel both

and be one traveler. People said what

was it like. It was like an airport terminal

without any televisions. Like waiting

a long time for a door to arrive. In
Outlaw

Josey Wales
Chief Dan George says that

rock candy's not for eating it's for looking

through. In 1981 an announcer said Ralph

Sampson's so tall he could reach out

and touch Uranus. I was thirteen, Earth

was a couch, without any irritable reaching

after fact or reason I placed thousands of

Sweet Tarts into my mouth. Five years

later someone said they saw Diane P.

kissing a girl in a car, and they punched

the window on the passenger side

in and I laughed, and it's all been as

people say downhill from there, meaning

until this moment I have been coasting,

but from this one forward Grace I vow

I shall coast no more.

Pocket

I like the word pocket. It sounds a little safely

dangerous. Like knowing you once

bought a headlamp in case the lights go out

in a catastrophe. You will put it on your head

and your hands will still be free. Or

standing in a forest and staring at a picture

in a plant book while eating scary looking wildflowers.

Saying pocket makes me feel potentially

but not yet busy. I am getting ready to have

important thoughts. I am thinking about my pocket.

Which has its own particular geology.

Maybe you know what I mean. I mean

I basically know what's in there and can even

list the items but also there are other bits

and pieces made of stuff that might not

even have a name. Only a scientist could figure

it out. And why would a scientist do that?

He or she should be curing brain diseases

or making sure that asteroid doesn't hit us.

Look out scientists! Today the unemployment rate

is 9.4%. I have no idea what that means. I tried

to think about it harder for a while. Then

tried standing in an actual stance of mystery

and not knowing towards the world.

Which is my job. As is staring at the back yard

and for one second believing I am actually

rising away from myself. Which is maybe

what I have in common right now with you.

And now I am placing my hand on this

very dusty table. And brushing away

the dust. And now I am looking away

and thinking for the last time about my pocket.

But this time I am thinking about its darkness.

Like the bottom of the sea. But without

the blind fluorescent creatures floating

in a circle around the black box which along

with tremendous thunder and huge shards

of metal from the airplane sank down and settled

here where it rests, cheerfully beeping.

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