the writing machine

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 piñata 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