Ghost Story, and: In the Vision Center, and: Stop the Rocket

Ghost Story

Mother smoked and breathed the wax gardenias.
The peach trees were weeping rotten fruit.
I asked who was the girl in the mantel's photo.

"Your aunt Clara, who took diptheria,
a wraith, your father's sister, the family beauty,"
and it was true. In an oval frame made

of heirloom silver she smiled. Her dress
was lace and mist, the image faded amber
from some old-fashioned process. I'd whisper

to her my creepy secrets and ask advice.
She never answered from her distance
until one night I woke, cold in mid-summer,

and saw that face shining across the room.
"I could sing," she said, "just like an angel.
I could recite my tables and Latin

lessons, but river germs formed a cobweb
of skin across my throat. I lost my breath
and took fever. Death loves a shining mark."

At breakfast I told the story, but ghosts
were not allowed to live in our house.
"Hush," said mother, "that time's behind us."

The picture disappeared, but the frail voice
came back when I tossed on sweaty sheets.
Mother kept her skeptic poise, smoking,

breathing the evening gardenias. "She was
too delicate for our world. Forget your dreams."
But Clara came back, claiming kin, begging

for a kiss, asking for her proper place
on the parlor's driftwood mantel. I never
saw her photograph again, and father

reaching out of his deepest silence,
told me the most precious hopes we have
are fragile as breath and sure to be lost.

"That's what beauty is," he said, "a ghost."

In the Vision Center

In the Tallapoosa County Wal-Mart
where the faithful gather for Sunday
bargains walled off from the frenzied
forsythia blossoms, split chrysalides
and the first stirring of fleas,
I stumble from the resident optician's
swivel chair and a chart obscure
as Linear B to discover in the sales
parlor a myriad of spectacles
in military file, and sixteen mirrors.
My dilated eyes give every man,
woman and child the blurred face
of a too-radiant angel,
though I know the multitudes
who witness this near-blindness
have come from suburb and mill
village for Kyle Petty t-shirts
and minor appliances. Here
for the Founder's Day Sale
they raise a murmur akin to singing,
but what I hear over the common
music of commerce is multitudes
humming and the strafing
scream of artillery over Tehran
on a hundred Sony consoles beyond
the food court's greasy steam.
As I blink to wash my tear wells,
the flickering fixtures over hardware
suggest an alien possession
the Enquirer by the cash register
could never explain. In the face
of such incarnation, I am almost
deranged. The teased coiffure
of a blonde pharmacist startles me,
and a girl in her jonquil-yellow
slicker says, "Mama, that man is
drunk, he's almost falling."
What is the voice now roaring
over the intercom's static crackle
if not God Himself threatening
to withhold all vision if I do not
change my life? Outside, I know,
the gouged ground for a deluxe
Lowe's awaits foundation stones,
and the traffic is whizzing. Is this,
amid bewilderment, a sacred place
after all? I stumble and apologize
to a dummy. I am too dazzled to know
a mannequin from a man. If I follow
the road past the outlet mall
and the state park's outburst of redbud
and cherry willow, will I end up
in Damascus, Tennessee, trembling,
refusing food and learning Braille
until some local prophet anoints
my lids and removes the scales?
Or will I be happily smashed
in a parking lot aisle by a speeding
Volvo on a mission from no one,
the driver struck by late winter
sunlight's glare? As the automatic
door hisses my exit, the flat
landscape trembles to stillness.
This is called "world coming
clear." Overhead clouds structure
the sky like...