Raised By Ghosts

I was raised by ghosts,
some more corporeal
than others.
Flicking in the wake of reality,
pages in books
offered comforting susurration,
assurances of stability.
Static and cyclical
people I knew and never met
whispered their yearnings,
their furies and failings,
lessons for lives
barely like mine.
They slept on bookshelves
in attic alcoves and hallways,
scattered in disorder
only in bedrooms
where other ghosts
would reside. On weekends
and holidays, in my mother’s room,
a poltergeist with bear-hugs
and piggyback rides,
trips to church
and chores to assign, would haunt
the Monday – Friday lives
he had left behind.
Beyond my mother’s room,
their room,
he ultimately ventured,
and I retreated,
my books shelter
from his presence
the same as from his absence,
from the spit-polished aura of calm
surrounding his tarnished wife,
from the infinitesimal tears
I felt on my bindings.

(with thanks to Kelly Norman Ellis)

Wouldn’t That Be Better?

It’s still jarring how quickly it gets dark. Class ends at three and my trek back to the dorm is made during sunset, the autumn kind with a distinct sweeping fullness. My building is on the lip of a basin that I half-expect to be filled with the light that’s gotten stuck in the leaves of surrounding trees and drizzled like syrup to the ground below. Usually, though, there are only the concrete walkways, bare except for the detritus of a college campus – a beer bottle, a sandwich wrapper, a pile of cigarette butts added to by a moody girl on a bench. I have learned to expect even less when I leave for work; night has ambushed the outside, unnoticed by me as I sit in front of my computer. It is not an upgrade to replace the glow of my laptop screen with the brash effulgence of streetlamps. I close my eyes for the walk, a straight line from point A to point B, the path of most resistance as I dawdle blind. My work-study job, the only one that hires people without federal intervention, is located in a house a spinster left to the school. The interior is as sad as it sounds, though the outside does its best to belie any rumors one might have heard. By the time I leave, it has been full dark for close to five hours and the sky has the over-saturated look of silk just pulled from a vat of dye. Four and half hours under fluorescent bulbs have sparked an appreciation for the intermittent puddlings of lamplight, but still, their blue-white glare buzzes in my eyes and I skirt it through sodden patches of grass. I make it a game, edging as close as possible to the perimeter of light, pretending that I will suffer the same bleached fate as the leaves flattened on the pavement. If the toe of my shoe accidentally trespasses, it doesn’t count, just because. Sometimes I’ll stop to stand under a lamp, one of the orange ones that bleeds auburn into the trees. Under it, everything has a hue that throbs, a ginger pop I can almost taste riding on the wildness of November wind. For a few seconds, I’ll pause, contemplate the leaves limned in titian flush, wait for the cold to push me along, wait for the next autumn sunset to slow me down.