Ghosts by Helena Bryony Parker
Ghosts
The day withered softly into nothing.
Not even troubling the flowers
teetering with decay at my bedside.
You visited me tonight, Father.
I sensed you coming
down the spider’s thread to my left ear,
the silver echo.
I did not look up at you,
I did not gaze the room to guess where you might be standing.
It’s cold comfort now, Father.
Like stale bread on a hungry night.
To the ghosts that stroll the streets of my room,
no more oranges and apples will be left out.
Tonight I keep my eyes to my book.
You left without a whisper.
//
I visited a clairvoyant last week
In the top story of a trendy yoga studio. When we sat down together
her hands were in her lap -
I can’t be objective. Describe her haircut
as if I were in another body and not wholly
bloody-clawed
dripping
in the present moment.
I cannot remember the surface ice of her words.
I cannot skate the rim.
I’m deep down there,
with the frozen carcasses of whales and woolly mammoths.
That dark groaning ice
that no light can reach, an absurd perversity of the womb.
In this region my blood thickens
and my heart slows
to a deep unbearable throb.
I cannot extricate myself from the present.
My heart’s in the game.
//
So why did she look at me and smile?
She’s trod this path before, led scores of us by the hand.
Those in want of a sign
that nothing is permanent.
She takes us down the dunes
for shipwrecks
and while she talked I scanned the sad-eyes of ghosts among the thickets.
Those souls desperate for contact were so grey they were transparent.
But I couldn’t hear you.
Could it be you’ve moved on to sunnier days, while I pick apart decaying floorboards
with a toothpick?
Still I can’t shake the heavy looks
of those who wished they’d recognised me.
I can never go home again
and think it empty.
//
It began after you died,
the finely wrought tug at my ear
That stopped up the noise
With cotton wool
and left only itself.
I overhead my mother ask my aunt,
“do you hear a ringing?”
It might be my father speaking.
And my Auntie seemed the sensitive one
to be a vessel for his echoing,
as he ricocheted through the firmaments
towards his afterlife.
I never told them it was me
I guarded my secret like a rat with its treasure
and kept it only for myself.
You’re ‘only a breath away’,
but whats the breath to the dominance of the eyes
the ears the touch
they smother breath and have more to offer me
than the breath ever could.
But still i heed you,
the heat is oppressive today.
The wind skates its way under the door frame
