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

Autumnal

Herbstlich - Atumnal 30 x 20 cm

SOME LEAVES

Maternity leave, sick leave, annual leave, an extended

leave of absence (sounds like a corporate coup d’ etat,

the quiet extermination, say, of a corner-office exec-

utive rat) planes leaving airports only to arrive at

other, nearly identical airports, children

on the verge of leaving home the first time

and so many people we know or don’t know, on the way   

out as well, some permanently, while others leap straight  

into the arms of some astonished Bayadere

on leave from the corps d’ ballet of a “major” company,

and that leaves Ingrid Bergman leaving Humphrey Bogart

at the end of Casablanca blah-blah, or is it he

who leaves her by staying behind with Claude Raines

though it’s hard to believe there are still

people alive who give a shit this way or that,

Nixon leaving the White House aboard

Marine One, a standard departure/arrival technology,

   was pretty weird

and there are the leaves of a maple dining-room table

opening onto a sumptuous view of melted gorgonzola

   on fresh spinach leaves  

and the only leaves outside right now are those leaves clogging

the drain of my balcony—I almost wrote the “brain” of my

balcony—and I once saw the tender mimosa

blossoms of Marrakech which aren’t leaves at all, but I don’t care,  

somewhere in a canary yellow courtyard near the  

souks, the rug market I think, an orange tree in its   

exact dusty middle, and wish I’d never had to leave,

escorted through graceful old age by fawning servants,

obedient wives, and one tender if toothless household pet.

Verdi - Requiem Dies Irae e Tuba Mirum