The Golem of Los Angeles

Psalm of Climbing with Ghosts

26 Psalm of Climbing with Ghosts Halfway to the top something pulls and i stop by this blue cast-iron gate in the whitewashed wall, this gated neighborhood of very small marble houses. Listening to cicadas scrape in the olive trees, i trespass among the headstones and tombs, feeling lucky to have limbs that move, and i raise a ghost toast to the moon. Now a tugging at my bowels, sun fading fast, the way up unsure, but i pause a moment longer by those houses of earth, damp single-bed rooms with a burned out bulb, and think of the strong man of the village who could lift a motorcycle with one hand, or the walleyed baker with his face smudged white with flour, of the boys playing soccer by the church, of the captain’s three daughters, each more beautiful than the next, and all now dead, dead, dead and underground and eaten by the earth. i listen to the wind sift through the trees and then lift off to become atmosphere, just sky spilling through sky, the way the moment i put down this pen the lucid marble of this graveyard will lift off into time, or remain here as i lift myself up the mountain toward the white village above. And as if i weren’t lost, as if it were possible to climb away 27 from death, i walk through the dark toward the lights, where the tables are made, and the families quarrel and serve and eat the feast that’s set before them inside the thick stone walls. Mountain Cemetery, Serifos, Greece ...