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