And now it’s the season of ghosts.
Whole fields of the dead shimmer
above April grass and pale flowers
of early spring. It’s the season
of ghosts and mud, of wind high
in still leafless trees waiting for one
more warm, showery day, of unseen
buds and weather rising toward glowing
sun or tumbling back to days of cloud
and icy rain. In the morning, every ghost
has eyes bound in webs of mist, round
as swelled stone fruit. See their shadows
move, their ears, nothing but pinholes
above wavering cheeks. Nothing solid,
nothing whole. Shapes embrace and
melt, exchange fluid limbs in this dance
of two dimensions, stirred by wailing
and tears. Each sings through mouths
of steel, shrill notes shrieking before
sleepers stir in their beds, wake to signs:
gray owls shifted to sunlight and to shade.
|