Ghost
- Ghost
For JSC
From our perch at Skytopwe could see it coming, the rain,tall stranger on the ocean's wide road.Five times that week it cameto make the azure water gun-metal gray.
It walked willowy. Was nothingand was something turning nothing,wisp-mist and then shower curtainbillowing beneath the dark rumbleas though the clouds on thick cart wheels rolled.
It came towards us but was hard to time,how far out? Water on waterdoesn't have to do with distance,and before it came a wind, a big sigh,both sad and lighthearted, coming and going.
When it arrived, it shut out the seaand went from sizzle to shaken tin,wet roar downpour bass drummingand was gone, the silver rivulets snakingdown slope, diving under undergrowth.
We felt raked over and left alone,touched by something big, untouchable,that loved too well and yet not at all.After a while only a few damp shapes on the tilewas all of what had been but was not now. [End Page 79]
Michael Chitwood is a freelance writer and teaches at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The New Republic, Threepenny Review, Field, The Georgia Review, and numerous other journals. Two books of his poetry—Salt Works (1992) and Whet (1995)—were published by Ohio Review Books. His third book, The Weave Room (1998), was published by The University of Chicago Press in the Phoenix Poets series. Other poetry collections include Gospel Road Going (2002), From Whence (LSU Press, 2007), and Spill (Tupelo Press, 2007). Spill and his most recent collection, Poor-Mouth Jubilee (Tupelo Press, 2010) were finalists for ForeWord magazine's poetry book of the year.
