Ghost Fragments

When I try to speak French, Italian spooks me,
less the form than the mood of it, the flighty rise and ebb.
*
People talk about phantom limbs, but rarely of the phantom itch.
The itch occurs, but what’s under it?
*
At the Salvation Army there’s a ghastly rack
of coats, the line-up of might-be ghosts
*
I know a slender woman haunted by her former heavy self.
The body has been exorcised; the spirit will not let go.
*
The song in my head this morning, a song I didn’t know I liked.
*
The typewriter, too, is not extinct. It lives on
in street work, factories, rivers, in feet descending stairs.
My father’s boxy black one.
My electric Brother.
*
in love, the ghoul of hate
*
When I was in high school, a boy in the next grade
was decapitated by a train, stumbling home drunk
by the overpass. Charlie. Everyone knew the story.

I can’t go through that part of town without thinking of it.
As if I'd been there. And it’s not Charlie who haunts
that part of town, but what happened to Charlie.
*
The parts haunt the sum.
The choir in the ostrich.
The goon in kangaroo.
*
the past / the smell of lavender / a stroke that stays in the bones / trauma /
fog / exhaust trapped in the atmosphere / abortion / childhood /
perfume / regret
*
We’re all haunted by Auschwitz, even the deniers.
We all stand here shoeless in the Polish snow.
*
to say nothing of graveyards
only the dead really give up the ghost
*
As a noun, “haunt” refers to a place a man can frequently be found.
He occupies it, fills and inhabits it, seeking
something he’ll never come home with.

(in response to Dave Bonta's post at Via Negativa)