Ghost Letter
Tonight the Chinese lanterns along the dock could lead your ghost to water;
the departing ones need light, for their sight has already dimmed.
As for me: I’m sitting at the edge of the old canal,
whispering this ghost letter, staring at the moon. Dear friend:
There is no one pitiable in this life. No "pitiful abundance."
If you saw back into this world, you would see me by the hydrangeas
still trained to chain-link fence, where you first took my photo.
If you have the inclination to look back, that is; if the dead
are changeless; if the gravsite is something other than a way of having,
in the end. When you were dying, the hospital chaplain stood in the doorway:
she said we should be tending to your immediate journey; she said
we should take turns sleeping; she said the room was too cold for words.
And someone told her: Quiet! Don’t you know the dead go on hearing for hours?
What might I have said? I’d made so many promises. According to one book
I’d consulted, the autumn fields were set afire after harvest, to warm
the dying, as they rose.
Night Letter
Even if God touched me, I was alone.
I thought: Empty or full, I am alone. I meant to avow
this emptiness, to practice what the saints had said:
"to leave a space inside, a breach for God – "
But at night you removed your gold band and set it on the dresser;
you unclasped your bracelet, serpentine, with green stones.
Your hands on my hands, for a moment,
it was as if God might be forgotten,
as if He’d gotten what He wanted –
Dear Oblivion, if I could taste you again and drink you down . . .
As once I did. I still recall
not the desire but its extinguishing:
nights with the bottle on the table by the window
that overlooked the city
whose streets I’d soon walk.
