The Apparition, and: A Catalogue of Lures

To wish a ghost to press against your breasts. To desire an automobile that runs on breath. To intend a kind of crime that cannot be undone. To dream the field of his barnyard-kind breath.

To withdraw one’s intent to make a harm. To negate the wish that one wished to harm. To never it out of your mind your unkindnesses. To further the dream of his hay-rough caress.

To be someone utterly good without a past. To be one who moves without a sense of tense. To get that ghost out from the walls for a kiss. To pull his ghost out your head for a long talk.

To make it all up, unsay everything ever said. To become so quiet you may as well be dead. To unthink the thinking he did unto you: true. To walk backwards across the campus lawn.

To move in rewind, reverse-time, across a lawn. To not let yourself pass his bright bent on the green. To make it certain you were never once seen. To move away from the fence at which your back bent.

To pull the very airplane down from that sky. To swing him back up to where he stood once. To put the mountain firm again beneath his feet. To hand him a meadow’s deep to wallow greenly into.

To remove yourself from the spot across which the huge shadow moved. The barge moved so silently one could not have known just when to run. And who runs from the hand of a shadow? But the blanket of it covered us, smothered us.

To ask what should not be asked is to ask what cannot be answered. Where are you and when will you come back?I’ve been hanging out on the corner of you for forever.No one sells soda pop, no one walks by whistling.

What’s it like up there, being a forever-person?Do you float upon a purple lightning cloud?Would send me beams of dreams if you loved me?If you and God play badminton, I bet you win every time.

A Catalogue of Lures

Beneath the glitter those low lights suspended above the barroom, he winced a little as I reminded a man’s blank stare he and I’d already met. Later, I’d see he simply didn’t like my direct manner of address. Soon

I’d consider he may not have found kindness in how I presumed to buy him drinks, perhaps thought me suspect of trying (indeed, it was trying) only to win his later-kiss, and no doubt he saw me glaring as he sucked

the mojito I’d paid for down as he stood close to an ugly woman I’d long been jealous of, jealous only for the fact I was aware that she too was a passenger in his station waiting for his train to arrive. Later, I awoke to the fact

he neither cared for my fashion, the orange cloth’s peacock feathers patterned across the silk that flew from my neck like an aviator’s scarf, nor was he impressed by my fondness for metallic shoes; he probably hated my too straight teeth too.

No doubt he felt animosity also toward the hospital at which I’d been born, though he’d never once asked where I was from. Was it my candor that was so off-putting, the fact I’d have lain down like a mat before his feet and didn’t have a problem

admitting that? It’s not like I have such a terrible laugh, or that I’m incapable of listening. If you asked, I could repeat the life of his story. I’m that good a scholar, my ear’s a whirlpool, my eye threads the hook with its line. I have been capable of the

behavior of statues. How many rivers have rushed by as I’ve stood fastened on the smart set of his teeth, the jaw with its flaws, the eyes refusing to meet with my eyes...