Ghost Month
- Ghost Month
As if the others weren't also.As if the moon, assuming a particular disposition, a certain aptitude, were the only measure.As when the crabs, bloated with life, quicken their way to the beach-height,that bed of split-straw and seaweed, to dig and scrawl, beyond the day's warmth,to the dark-wet depository their instinct demands.
As if March were a breathing mouth and not a lamp baring the way upward.Or August browning nonetheless under the early rains.
For you, we say, this bowl of basil,champagne grapes upon their scaffold,this white crane creased by the earnest.
What is it you seek but wonderment and delicious trouble?That wooden stool with its finish worn bare?The light that responds to the sound of our voices? [End Page 34] Take this house we burn it for you.Can you see your grandson in the door?The car with its wheels turned toward the curb to stop it from rolling?
Do not be saddened by the sudden decline of the pocket harmonica.By the speed-wash setting on the digital machine.Take joy in the smoke the world smoke it rises.The night-market with its oils and cutlets.
Know that you are our recurring occasion.
That this is the expression of your coming.
That we have dug a hole and filled itwith sawdust and pitchand set it afire and called it our longing.That we have made ourselves into earthlight and season.That we carry you forward into our changing,and shall keep so till our wide-time is done. [End Page 35]
Randall Watson is the author of The Sleep Accusations, which received the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry (currently available through Carnegie Melon Press), Las Delaciones del Sueno, (published in a bilingual edition by the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico), The Geometry of Wishes (published by Texas Review Press), and No Evil Is Wide (a revised version of "Petals," winner of the Quarterly West Prize for the Novella, by Madville Publishing). He is also the editor of The Weight of Addition, an anthology of Texas poetry published by Mutabilis Press.
