Ghosts

Ghosts - 60 x 80 cm acryl on canvas

GHOSTS

                                                                                                                  

Sometimes I see one

or two of them, coming literally

out of nowhere but doing quite

ordinary things like, as is routine

here in Berlin, dancing around dog

shit on the sidewalk, a seriocomic

ballet of evasion, or pretending

to contemplate a shop window.

Then I’ll spot the giveaway: this one’s

missing the tension that once gave life

to Eva’s face, or the damp sheen of awareness

in her eyes; and that particular pseudo-apparition’s 

wearing shoes that Jonathan, whose sense of style was not

so much acute as World Historical, wouldn’t be caught

dead in. They usually arrive with a grip on

my heart and lungs, can’t catch my breath, feel like there’s

a balloon in there gradually expanding. A real ghost

doesn’t haunt the streets of Berlin, but lives in the mortal soul, is

an indelible moment such as when my grandmother reached

out to me through a fog of terminal morphine,

the door of her hospital room

open, I, seventeen-years old,

standing in the corridor as I turned away,

too sad and frightened to touch her,

too utterly abandoned to say good-bye.

Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Herbert von Karajan conducts The Wiener Philarmoniker

The Passing World

untitled (acrylic/ink) 42 x 56 cm by Karin Goeppert

OLD POET

                                For Jack Gilbert

Wrestling with austerities

in thorny, bare spaces. Smooth and

congenial as cactus, you cast yourself out.

All the crimes of a life—did you ever

injure a man, damage a woman?—you presented

quietly, in dry image, no obvious shame, rhetoric

not too richly seasoned, just a sprinkle 

of rosemary or sage on a lamb chop.

You talked to God but didn’t believe in Him.

You blamed the Devil for spreading pain

then thanked Him for Palladian moonlight,

for roasted goat meat on a mountainside   

in Greece. Romantic, Modernist, Individualist.

Experts said that you were the end of all these things:

what a luxury not being post whatever: being just

an inch before the after. Pleasure you damned faintly   

for not lasting long enough, for demanding renewal,      

and yet you delighted in appetite. And suffering

was as much to be enjoyed as the texture

of a woman’s skin, as the aroma of ripe tomatoes   

in Umbrian summer. Beaten on by the sun and by the wind, in    

exile even at home, feral hearted, you were wary of comfort,   

of growing mild in old age: you need not have worried about that. 

 

Remember Shakti

John McLaughlin/Zakir Hussain and guests