Well I don't believe in ghosts or anything
I know that you are gone and that I'm carrying some version of
you around
Some untrustworthy old description in my memories
And that must be your ghost taking form, created every
moment by me dreaming you so
And is it my job now to hold whatever's left of you for all time?
And to reenact you for our daughter's life
I do remember when I was a kid and realized that life ends, and
it's just over
That a point comes where we no longer get to say or do
anything, and then what?
I guess just forgotten
And I said to my mom that I hope to do something important
with my life, not be famous, but just remembered a little more
To echo beyond my actual end
And my mom laughed at a kid trying to wriggle his way out of
mortality, of the inescapable final feral scream
But I held that hope and grew up wondering what dying means
Unsatisfied, ambitious, and squirming
The first dead body I ever saw in real life was my great
grandfather's embalmed in a casket in Everett, in a room by the
freeway where they talked me into reading a thing from the
bible about walking through a valley in the shadow of d**h,
but I didn't understand the words, I thought of actually walking
through a valley in a shadow with a backpack and a tent.
But that dead body next to me spoke clear and metaphor-free
In December 2001, after having the spent summer and fall
traveling mostly alone around the country that was spiraling
into war and mania, little flags were everywhere, remember?
And I was living on the periphery as a 23-year-old (?) wrapped
up in doing what I wanted, and it was music, and being on
newsprint, and sleeping in yards without asking permission,
and eating all the fruit from the tree like Tarzan, or Walt
Whitman, voracious, devouring, laughing, singing my song
But that December I was shaken by a pregnancy scare from
someone I had been with for only one-night, many states away
that I hadn't planned to keep knowing
A young and embarra**ing overconfident animal night, and the
terror of the idea of fatherhood at 23 destroyed my foundation,
left me freaked out and wandering around
Mourning the independence and solitude that defined me then
And I saw my ancestors as sad and misunderstood, in the same
way that my descendants will squint back through a fog trying
to see some polluted version of all I'm meant to be in life
Their recollections pruned by the accidents of time, what got
thrown away and what gets talked about at night
But she had her period eventually, and I went back to being 23
11 years later I was traveling alone again on an airplane from
Auckland, New Zealand to Perth, Western Australia, very alone
so far away from you and the home that we had made
I watched a movie on the plane about Jack Keroauc, a
documentary though, in deeper than the usual congratulations
and repetitions of the Beat Generation stuff
They interviewed his daughter Jan Kerouac, and she tore
through the history
She told about this dead beat drinking, watching three-stooges
on TV, not acknowledging his paternity, abandoning the child,
taking cowardly refuge in his self-mythology
Dead-beat dad (get it?)
And then she spoke, I heard your voice telling me about the
adults who had abandoned you as a sweet kid, and left you to
grow precariously. And then she spoke out in her face, and saw
you looking back at me.
On a tiny airplane-seat screen at the bottom of the world, I saw
a French-Canadian resemblance, and I heard suffering echoing
A lineage of bad parents and strong daughters withstanding
And she had black hair and freckles and pale skin just like you,
and she told the hard truth and slayed the Gods just like you
I saw the cracks in the façade of posterity
I missed you so I came home
The second dead body I ever saw was you, Geneviève, when I
watched you turn from alive to dead right here in our house
And I looked around the room and asked “Are you here?” And
you weren't, and you are not here. I sing to you though
I keep you breathing through my lungs in a constant
uncomfortable stream of memories trailing out until I am dead
too
And then eventually the people who remember me will die,
containing what it was like to stand in the same air with me,
and breathe, and wonder why
And then distortion
And then the silence of space
The night palace
The ocean blurring
But in my tears right now, light gleams