We were talking at dinner about ghosts,
so I thought I'd read a poem about a ghost.
"Memorial Day"
In field guides they are always in repose:
tiny female, olive gray, so like the local birds,
The male shiny black with tail stripes, wing bars,
shoulder coloration such a vivid orange
I might have recognized him in the elm.
But this close-- for days, midday over and over,
they sprang from the nearest branch of the shrub,
slinging themselves at the glass,
then hovering there with so much apparent purpose
my son said, why don't you open the window and let them in?
For a moment it was the voice of clearest reason,
and it must have been the same for the early fishermen
on the Klamath river after the terrible dark winters
of retribution, seeing the water clot with fish and fish twist
willingly into their nets,
who thought the salmon had been sent to feed
them and their families.
Hadn't they prayed steadily and weren't the fish
laboring upstream?
Likewise my father's cousin deep in the mud and confusion
of the war heard a woman's voice distinct
as a mouth harp, his dead wife's voice
urging him out of the foxhole, out
of the path of the sudden German shell that killed the others.
And now two rare impatient birds flying at me, erect,
sun struck, treading the air, their mouths propped open
as if to speak, as if they were not birds but messengers.
But I am overrun with signs and omens:
the pair death has taken swim up like motes in my eye.
I find them everywhere I look.
I put them there.
It is a blindness.
American redstart warblers.
If they have meaning, maybe they represent the living, not
the dead.
And I am meant to understand death
is locked behind the glass that teases
with our own reflections, until the implicating sun moves
to the southwest and the window once again holds only shadow.
It's been a week since their last visitation.
At the window, the smudge of purple,
those small rich berries the buds made,
has opened into the blossoms' distinguishing pastel,
a thicket of lilac.
From time to time a catch among the usual calls,
a sequence of notes not a warble at all,
but abrupt chips of sound to match the guide's approximating
graph, which records, though it cannot translate,
what they say.
[APPLAUSE]
Gee, you're good listeners, that's a long poem.