You Wouldn’t Like It Here
When Michael Jackson slides into my DMs
asking for a bitcoin or two, I am sure
that nothing sits on the other side of death.
Sure, that Elvis is lying deep beneath the soil
of Graceland. Sure that the dead don’t return. But once,
after Kailey told me of her grandmother
calling from the other side, I wasn’t sure. Her voice
was clouded in static, she told me, but it was her.
The way I am not sure when my mother claims
the ghost of her father appeared one night, in his chair
by the woodstove, saying bluntly of Heaven:
you wouldn’t like it here before dissipating.
I wish my apocrypha were that elegant.
When my dead come back they weren’t grotesque
and multitudinous. After Benny died,
all the kids in our dorm revived him on a Facebook page.
Our condolences built him a new body. Auto-
generated his voice. Whatever he is now, I cannot say.
Less a phantom than a phishing scheme.
Day after day, his emails begin: dude, it’s been a minute.
Method Actors
Beneath our feet, the ice popped
as we talked about the dead girl.
How she was lost on a night like this,
never found when the spring thawed,
when the ATVs
revved through the forest like hornets.
How, now it was happening again.
The actress sent her to portray her.
One of these method types. Left clue
in an away message on her Twitter feed.
Whose woods these are I think I know –
TMZ has her buying a red coat
the Sunday before last. California sun
making tinsel of her hair. She wouldn’t
make it to Christmas. Last seen
where the dead girl was, the same fork
in the trail, the same clouds
bringing flurries and blankets of fog.
Chair
The real chaos theory is how many people
from your graduating class married each other.
How many of their children crawl
through your social media feed, haunting
your old haunting grounds. The other day
I took a registry of all the places I bespeckled
my virgin lungs, and was filled with pride
at the slow decay of my body. Once off the trail
at Silver Lake and again deep in the glass
of it. On the roof of the French Restaurant
and again in the guts of the gazebo. Blueberry Hill
with the blueberries and again with black.
A hundred times in the forest, intruded upon
by horses and surveyors. I wonder if my childhood
has been demolished yet, if you can still stand
upon the roof of the lake, still listen
to the ghostly melody a stone makes
scooting across the ice. You said it sounded
like a loon having its call forced down its throat.
Such a violence in hating the things you once loved.
I yearn now only for the distant yips of snowmobiles.
Their devouring by pines and cedars.
Underhill
My grandmother is calling from Underhill,
on my birthday, five years after she died.
It’s like one of those stories she used to tell
of her dead husband putzing around the house.
How she’d wake one night to the neon fuzz
of a Red Sox game, the sound of his rocking chair
tracing the grooves in the cement floor.
Or how she would smell motor oil and mown grass
milling about the yard in the dead of winter.
In reading a history of ancient cultures,
I have found that when a storyteller dies
all their creations are summoned across the void.
Maybe, she knows I need to hear the story
of the little green men who came parading down her lane
Against our insistence she went to her grave
swearing it was true. Wishing that someone
was awake to share it with her. Her daughters
or husband, someone to pull the curtains crisp,
to leave the cat out to yowl. Instead,
she stood dumb in the darkness, watching
their backs dissolve down the lane.
Gossamer
Up in the old settlement behind the high school.
The snake grass rising with paleolithic stalks
between half sunken foundations and old stone walls.
I haven’t been up here since the sixth grade,
since it took half the class holding hands to encircle
the old oak. Since the sounds of a soccer game
came humming through the undergrowth. I wonder
if Mrs. Mathis still rings her cowbell to celebrate
a goal on Friday nights. If the capitalist objector
still lives off the grid in a decayedsprintervan. I
am trying to remember the silence. The trees
creaking like opening doors. Opening to where
we’d ask, while stoned at cross country practice.
The silence was always huddled around us then.
Making cloisters between boughs of trees. The way
lights mute a copse, the way the first corpses
appeared in the dying vernal pools. I knew the boys
who snuck the trout into the disappearing water.
Knew their cruelty and often shared it. I knew
one who got cold feet and wanted to save it. Went,
but found only leaves, fallen just so, in waves
of red, orange, and green, like the underside
of a fish swimming away in a disassembled rainbow.
I can’t shake the feeling we were already haunted
during those days. That the glimmer of some gorgeous
ancient menace would hang forever, so elegantly
around us, like gossamer enwrapping our faces.
