And I'm going to read some things
from a collection I'm currently working
on that's based in ghosts.
And I've been thinking a lot about
and trying to kind of work with the ideas of grief lately.
And largely because in this country,
it seems like we're kind of in the business
of producing grief for others and exporting it
on a large scale.
And so, thinking about how that works,
and how ghosts are in a certain sense
a manifestation of unacknowledged, but communally
produced grief.
And I'm also really interested in the genre of the ghost
story, and the way in which that genre tries to diffuse exactly
that and tries to put off a kind of acknowledgment of those
things one cannot face.
I'm sure ghosts are many other things too,
including just what they seem to be, those people coming back.
But I think there's room for them
to be those people coming back and manifestations
of other things as well.
So this text plays with incorporating
ghost stories, retelling ghost stories,
and that sort of thing.
And this section is called "One No".
When this, it goes, she said, window, window, why come thou?
Watch now.
My watch as its match spring, my love was an eland.
And I that hypnotic, I tuned up a table, all marrowed
and craving, the chant won't un-giving.
A knuckle, a breastbone, a light switch, an ibis.
They say, wherever bird enter, when there as it happens,
a bird comes into the house uninvited,
most often through a window, someone will die soon.
My lover, that eon, my watcher, that whiteness.
That bone there, an icon, I stumble to seem like.
I stutter and bleach eye.
I winnow on farther.
Which, unlike further, means a distance you can measure,
and my boat such a small one.
Often against its will, a ghost is called, maybe wrenched,
from its flight in place with a sound.
Don't even think about it.
Maybe hurtled toward a light inside
of which a certain play of wing and sand
had been trying to forget, as had the ghost in 1
Samuel 28:13.
Who said, I have been torn by the touch.
I am blind, and I flinch and had forgotten
how the world in which you live is
so limited in its range of visible light.
There was a certain point at which the story changed
from that of the living who traveled to the underworld
and back, and became instead one of the dead who
came from the land of the dead and could not return.
Is a turning.
Why are we frightened by doorways?
Why is there a fear specifically focused
on the sound of a door, or an ear, or a stare?
A face is an aperture, but also a ligature.
Something deep inside the house swings
shut, and they start to describe it as something else.