Sunday, April 5, 2020



The Book Of Ghosts

Jacob Rakovan








Glendower:
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur:
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?


Henry The Fourth, Part I Act 3, scene 1






Ben Sztuba

Your house, the horror house
the doberman vicious
one eyed, blind and tumorous
clawing inside the door.
shouting, and barking.

The phones torn from the walls
kept locked in the trunk of your car
your heavy hands
blurry blue tattoos on the knuckles
"love" and "wine",
motor oil in the cracked skin.

Your belt worn sideways,
a motorhead, a mechanic
drinker of cheap Polish brandy.

Your family learned
to live around your edges
and I learned to move
in that undercurrent of fear
to leave when you came home.

Your youngest son a policeman now,
he answers the calls
for men like you, impotent and angry
full of stupid spite.

What misery it must have taken have taken
to make our house a refuge
our house of hoarded metal,
of shuttered windows
our dirt and danger seem safer than home.

His brother always your greasy mirror
a thief of bicycles, a bully
a sadist with a clothespin
your wife, bending spoons
and reading tarot
speaking to the dead
and the dead only.
When I learned of your death
of the loss of my father's only friend
I let out the breath I did not know I held
I let my steps fall louder on the stairs.










Steve Gurney

Our yards divided by a concord grapes
on rusted fences, a strawberry patch
you, 71 then, teller of lies
gifting me with arrowheads
chipped from broken coffee mugs
pulled from the trash burning in oil drums
"ancient artifacts" you said
the mug handle still attached.

Your pond, stocked with catfish
with overgrown goldfish
bullfrogs and water walkers.
Your boys hunting squirrels on our acre.
The smell of squirrel brains frying with eggs
hominy grits and black coffee.

Your house, all meager screen
and cookpots catching the rain
and you, hillbilly gristle
scarecrow, a possum, a haint.

Your wife a white ghost.
Your lies about angels with books
at the foot of your bed.
Your heart stopping on an operating table
light that pulled you out of yourself
and spat you back like a fish bone
a plug of Red Man spit in a radiator.

You transplants, on that wild road
where they scratched the addresses
on the mailbox with pocket knives
gravel line between two counties.

Your old hound chasing turtles
howling at the moon.
The white scar over your heart
You showed me, solemn.
When you died, I wept.
Your sons filled the pond
with rusting washing machines
and scrap.

Mosquitoes in the stagnant water,
the grass grown tall
that summer the birds had all the grapes





Tom King

Your junkie girlfriend in tow,
you came to my place, asking for a future
for a spread of cards that said something other than they said
other than the slaves chained at the foot of the devil,
other than death's pale rose

We played half-assed Slayer riffs
farther into the night than we should have,
the double bass steady as a doomsday clock
shared coke reeking of ether on a bar toilet tank
and I told you, even then
in the midst of my own dying
to stop.

You could not stop.
When you were climbing,
building cell phone and radio towers
dangling on safety lines above the birds,
the distant earth.

Did not stop in Africa,
shooting still with dirty needles,
the company refusing to fly you home
the poison spreading through your blood and your fever

and home, they amputated your hands,
leaving you two tattooed drumsticks
to hold, and fingerless, you could not tie off
could not press the plunger, and stopped

until you begged your friends, and they
tied off your severed arms, shot you full
of stopping, of white flowers,
of the end of the story.







The World is a Burning House

You will not die, though the ash of the burnt piano
grow briars, though the pipes clot with dirt
the well fill with toads
your cement blocks rot like teeth.

Holes in the bathroom walls
the wet black mud beneath the floors
a king of rats, indissolvable knot
I drag you behind me.

Still they post mail at your address.
You habitation of devils, you vulture's cage,
sunken city and carrion
Your grass still grows green as a graveyard.

Black tar lung
you are the soft spot at my core,
you worm in the wood
you frost-blighted plum tree.

I am a broken house, my siding falling off
my sodden carpet and rotten couch
my rats, my wasps.
My tongue is a hangman's knot
and my father hangs at the end of it
the clapper for my hollow bell

You sink full of maggot.
You attic of fucking raccoons.
My guts rattle with your grease.
Your stink comes through my skin,
black socks and zest soap
coke ovens and anger.

I am burned and rotten
past wrath and sorrow
I am dead wood and foxfire
the collapsing septic tank, this rusting shed
and you, specter of all my specters:

You sit alone at the funeral
You buyer of caskets
You borrowed polyester suit

What black thing did you bargain with?
What squats on your bloodline?
What spider, what owl, what engine?

You fixer of broken machinery,
you yellow-toothed smile.
They seat you at their table.
They pour you milk.








George R. Cookingham

You first, to ride ahead on the lampless road
the bikes, half-stolen, kicking mailboxes in the pistol-whipped dark
the dodged bullets, climbing barbed wire fences
the night we came across an open grave,
the casket sitting in the middle of the street,
the black tar of the road.

You stole a car, and wrapped it around a tree
walked a half mile on a broken leg,
your punctured lung flecking your lips with blood
threw gravel at my window.

Our science fair project
to take a picture of the soul,
and your father's death in the middle of it,
the voltage running through the copper plate,
over Ectochrome film
calling devils in the dark of the wheatfields.

That moon grinning down,
your dead father hanging over us
as we smoked his funeral flowers
over the bloody mirror,
huffing gasoline from cans.
Everclear in a gallon jug
My father's stolen .22 Ruger

Every broken window in the church
a tooth to catch your absent god.
His relics in your backpack
as you climbed from windows,
escaped asylums.
When your heart stopped,
your truck kept going
through the intersection and into a telephone pole
The camper where I hid you rotted into the ground
my house burned to the foundation
your girl's head filled with ghosts.








Gary Lynn Coffey

There is a house for men
when they are shaking,
when they are thirsty,
when they have no other house.

There is a song for the loveless
for the rusted truck and the shotgun
a song for dry places
a song for the scar.

In the long and godless Sunday
of waiting to die,
the interminable afternoons
the loneliness of an empty bottle:

a jukebox hymnal and border-town heaven
honky tonk on the edge of hell
this chapel, these ministers of grace.

Come into this cool dark place
steady your hand with a drink.
Play us a song.







Tim Cantrell

He was a horse thief and a drunk and my friend.
I found him sleeping in tall grass,
outside the bar, met him when he lived
in the woods,
hiding from the law.

With a needle wrapped in string,
a bottle of India ink, I scrawled
a blurry cross on his arm, the alcohol bled out
In prison, he read Blavatsky.

In prison, he read Blavatsky.
and did his time.
He carried in his head, a murdered father,
a tangle of useless language,

Blavatsky with her roses,
her cigars, her Secret Doctrine
and her Pyramids.

We used to play Pyramid,
with a pinochle deck,
and endless blue cases of beer.
Played Circle of Death,
the bicycle cards face-down on a stained carpet.

The burned down houses,
the bartered cigarettes
Blavatsky and a blurry cross
Sunken pyramids
coke and hotel rooms.

When you slept,
they'd shoot you up again
to wake you.

Now your sons are fatherless,
you haunt their heads
the table where you died
some shrine, the pill-dust
in the cracks of the wood.

You died, your secret safe
the head full of Blavatsky,
dead fathers gone into dark
a blurry cross on your arm.







The City

tumulus and cenotaph,
grows meadow-bright in the char of housefires,
the rank and rotten fabric of a child's dress.

The engines are rusting, silent room after room
the last word rings, the phone, unanswered
petroleum plastic fetish.

A mill willed to the devil and his fire.

The books swell with rain, with silverfish
with a swollen tongue of affluence we do not speak:
let them burn.

Let strange gods return to the stones,
Let the hollow galleries ring with vandals,
flowers grow from the midden.

We will drag our plows through the bones of the dead
We will prepare a ruined house for our caller,
the dwarf with blazing eyes and rotten teeth
A flowering tree in the skull of a car
a circle drawn in the dust.







Theda Bara in chrome

In the retro-futurism of the aluminum diner,
chrome and saltshakers, the Formica and mirrors
everything gleams like
new teeth, like rocket ships
and Chevy bumpers
and she walks in,
a cloud of sand, a palpable darkness
hovering over bones

To be good is to be forgotten.
soundless, on her black lips
her eyes still burning, like they can peel back
the plastic counter top, to unbeing
she is the devourer of boys

she lounges across the vinyl seat,
all languor and shadow,
black wings and jewels.
“Bride of the sphinx,
weaned on serpents blood”...

The waitress comes,
all messy blond and soft south
a red red mouth,
and Theda rolls her eyes.
The coffee is black and starless, a shew-stone.

There's a dead Cincinnati girl in a grave
and Theda sits over her bones,
crowned in snakes, white gold and skin
an exhalation of steam
witch of burning celluloid,
the magic lantern show.

Always silent, a pantomime of desire
of hunger, of Arab death and starless desert
of the hunger of empty places

The well lit dining room,
the gleaming meringues spinning in a chrome case
the weary wives over eggs, the husbands and babies
and grease

and Theda, dark spot against the light
in the corner of your eye
other lover, wife of the dark
always hungry at the feast
always childless,

the envious one, with the owl's feet
haunter of lonely places, robber of cradles,
pale Madonna, upside-down saint
torturer of monks, lover of stagnant water.

The dark is not a mask
you take off at the end of the day
not a face you pretend to wear,
an outfit to hang in the closet
a poster, a reel of film

It swallows you in the end, hungry ghost
lost in the idol raised in your name
they hang thick in the air,
supplication and sacrifice of
American gods
nameless and unforgotten.







After Bocklin's Die Toteninsel

Again and again, you painted it,
the island, the boatman with the draped casket,
the trees growing towards black,
the doorway harsher, oblong.

An island like a broken tooth,
dim windows in the rock face,
a glass sea, Avalon and Ys

How they almost claw the sky,
that black and frozen fire
of cypress, the hole in the world,

Where you lost eight of your fourteen children
"a dream image" you called it, but she knew
that not-yet countess with the name of your child,
and asked you to paint in the casket,
her husband, dead of diphtheria
the woman in white that will not face us.

And once they were there,
you went back to the first version
and painted them in, and every one after
like photographs of the same endless day.

He knew it too, that charnel house builder,
that gravedigger with the Chaplin moustache,
knowing something of the kingdom behind that door

He bought it and hung it in the Berghof,
then the Reich Chancellery in Berlin
where it hung through the war.

One image lost in a bombing raid,
a burning bank in the skeleton of a city,
a sacrifice, holocaust, library of Aexandria
adornment for Dis, for Xibalba

Still they row towards black,
towards the stone house
the tiny coffin, the faceless psychopomp
the rower, in the still and ceaseless day.





We took to the sea in search of Paradise

and the storm drove us on for fifteen days
till we came to the island of silence
where we followed a dog
to an empty city,
the beds turned down, the lamps bright
the larders stocked, but not a soul astir.

Long shadows fell in the quiet houses
clocks kept the hours till the world falls
we would not be satisfied, and
cast off again,

and came to an island of sheep
the streams thick with trout
and another thronged with wheeling birds
and one lit on his shoulder and laughed
“seven years you will wander,
and still not find what you seek”

and ever west, we came to land
on a great stone resting in the sea
and going ashore, found nothing
and lit a great signal fire,
and stood round in a ring
and the ground trembled
and we were sore afraid
and returning to the boat,
saw the beast whose back we had stood upon
sink beneath the waves,
one black eye like the moon below the water

and rested, after,
on an island of men whose tongues had died in their mouths
and their silent abbot, only, his voice cracking from disuse
said “eighty years”, and his voice was as a library of dust.

Leaving them, we skirted those shores
where the head of Judas rests
one side frozen, the other burning
speaking in a strange tongue
and weeping stones,
and men with the heads of pigs
scream among the flames
rivers of golden fire pour from the black mount of hell

and one of our company was swept overboard, and lost
and worms devoured the outer skin of the boat
and the sea was still and white as milk
and still we chased the sun over the world's rim.

A beast rose up, horrible mouth
open, the fish fleeing before him
till swallowing his tail, he encircled the boat
and closed round like a hangman's knot
till the ribs of the currach creaked
and he sank like a stone, and the storm came after
and our captain sang, and the fish circled round to listen
and calmed the sea.

We came to a column of ice, or glass
that rose up from the sea farther than we could see
smooth and windowless
surrounded all around by golden nets
so vast we sailed between their meshes,
and called out, but none answered
and three days we sailed round that watchtower
and into fog so thick we could not see.

We were met in that grey land by a youth
so curious I could not describe him
who took half of our company ashore
to a land so green one could not believe it
and for fifteen days we wandered in that blessed place
where the sun never sets
till we came to a river so wide we could not cross
and the sound of far of singing, and a grey light
as a city casts its own false dawn on the horizon
or the glint of metal seen from afar.

Our guide would speak no human tongue
but would take us no farther
and there was sound of thunder.

Returning to our companions,
we were met with much alarm,
for they had waited in the harbor for a year and a day
living only on such fish as they could lure with lines,
and rain was their wine

the wind lifted, and we sailed back
the way we had come, and now I am old
and still I do not know what we saw there
here we keep the hours
and after Compline,
we enter the great silence.






Little Ghost,

You have kept your vigil
patient in the dark
now, the days go on.

Here, it is Winter.
The streets are full of snow.
There are small lights on all the houses.
We expect to be surprised.

When the bright noise of a house is made,
When the year ends,
and goes down to where you are
We will not hear you.

They are listening for bells,
as you wait for trumpets
that I cannot promise will come.

Your mother misses you,
the way one misses a tooth that will not grow back
the way a burned down house still accepts mail.

Your cousin saw a magic trick
from the other side yesterday, and wept,
for the loss of that mystery,
for the thing that is taken
when we know, with finality.

We do not know if we will see you again,
but we hope it is comfortable where you are,
that there is a kind of weather,
a kind of postcard,
from that foreign country
from which you cannot return.

Is it crowded, or lonely there?
We hope it is bright, and filled with music.
We hope, in the face of everything.










Ode

O trash heap of forgetting
you reel of tape, dusty 78 record
with your tinny warble and dead piano player:
Mouthless, mouse-nest library
of well chewed books
nest of garter snakes

O my attic trunk
my boarded dormer, stuffed
with inherited mementos
moth-eaten doll clothes of the dead
stale communion wafers.
You yard-sale encyclopedia,
You junk-drawer of unsent letters.

How you sit atop this housefire,
this tree of charred birds
in constant alarm.
This bloom of red flowers and rust
of old knives and bloodstained mattresses
molasses and whiskey
sump pump-basement of my body
this timpani-opera of my terror
this six-ambulance carcrash of panic.

Telegraph wire ties you together,
this postal-system of nerves and knotted string.
these dictionary teeth and sand-dune tongue
this rusted clot of silence.

Sing of her.












Goat (for Rachel)

Amalthea took the baby godling in her cave
And gave suck to thunder.
The metalsmith priests covered the cries with dancing.
The carnival-king father ravened in his heaven
A piƱata filled with stones, a big bad wolf daddy
Hungry to swallow babies, a bloody sickle in his hand.

Her broken horn is a drinking cup filled with flowers
Her hot blood dissolves diamonds.
Set in a sea of stars, she took a mermaid’s tail
And crowned herself.

Melancholy Queen
she gives milk to exiles,
she is mercy in flesh.

She is the soft dark where the stars are set

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