Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinking, eyes looking up to the crown of the world.
I want stars, I want seabreeze, I want the Face of God.
I want to get out of the dry places, the places with dust in the graveyard.
I want to find a place where God will cry, where they properly mourn the stars.
Oh, I want stars, I want seabreeze, I want the Face of God, all on the ocean where I’ll stand, waiting,
sinking.
I am that I am, says this voice, and I am that I will be.
This voice resonates; it is heard in the very marrow of your bones.
What it is called is unpronounceable, but it has another name,
so for simplicity’s sake, call it God.
It asks so many things of you that your heartstrings tug you to do.
You listen, if only because it is a thin voice, and quiet.
She says, I have never been one for staying quiet;
I told him—or I would have had he asked—what it is I will be,
what it is I will eat, what I will do.
I, Lilith, sit atop my throne made of bones,
watching in my mirror forever the God
who no longer utters my name.
It is all right, she says, that they do not record my name,
because I did not say much while he built the Ark. I was quiet.
She is grateful that she survived at all the wrath of God,
as grateful as anyone who has seen all the world drown can be.
While her husband received a rainbow she collected bones,
because for a long time she did not know what else to do.
I laughed, she says. What else could I do?
I was ninety-nine years old, and so I made laughter his name.
I had already felt old age settle into my bones.
I named him Isaac because I couldn’t keep my laughter quiet,
but my laughter was rewarded. How else could it be?
My name was changed to Sarah, and I became a princess of God.
Here is a man, sent with a staff into Egypt by his God.
He said, You have made a mistake; I do not know what to do.
He was given to write the future of the world as it needs must be,
with the promise that for everything else, his people would remember his name.
I will not, he says, see the Promised Land. His voice is quiet.
My name will be carried into the Land, but they will leave behind my bones.
There is something, she says, bothering my bones;
my children cry and so I cry out to God.
He does not always hear her, for the way she weeps is quiet.
On the road on the way to Efrat, weeping is all she can do.
Remember Ephraim, she moans, for they call Rachel—they call my name,
and a voice begging for Ephraim is all I can be.
In the quiet at the end of Creation, the voice ponders what is left to do.
The first woman, made from bones, has received her name,
and this God-made world flowers, eager to be.
To transition from the Monster Suite to a bunch of structured poems, the Zombie Sestina, y'all.
Said the zombie to the preacher man,
there’s this aching in my bones.
I have become this symbol for consumerism: mindless.
I am not whatever I used to be.
Tell me if I can ever find some rest,
if memes have immortal souls.
I’m getting out of this business—souls—
yawned the paunchy preacher man.
Archetypes need a vacation, zombie, some rest
for cliches and old bones.
There’s got to be some new things out there—got to be—
but in nostalgialand, in metaphor, we mind less.
I remember, said the zombie, when I wasn’t so mindless,
just a desperate voodoo slave to beautiful wicked souls.
Whatever it was I could be
me, one, a single lost and wordless man,
dragging my mind like spare parts until I could take my bones
to earth and forgetting and all the rest.
I don’t know about you and all the rest,
the preacher said, but my job is feeling mindless.
I haven’t changed at all. In my bones
I know I’m just a sidekick to the heroes’ struggling souls.
I want to be something other than a cartoon spokesman,
but it’s been so long I wouldn’t know what to be.
Said the zombie, I don’t know what any us monsters and men could be,
but I know we need a rest.
Let something else represent the fears of man;
let us shuffle out of the race memory grinning and mindless;
in the junkyard of cultures let us drop our motifs, themes, souls,
meanings, connotations, denotations, associations, guts and bones.
I can’t represent anything more than me, said the zombie. I’m only bones.
I’ll take my rotting flesh and muscles and be
silent if you’ll only bury me; I’ll say nothing of hereafters or souls,
I won’t weigh in on the possibilities of oblivion or eternal rest,
if you’ll only bury me, all of me, leaving my legacy voiceless, mindless,
if you’ll leave me sleeping nothing more than the corpse of a man.
Said the preacher, I can’t stop picking at souls any more than you can at bones.
But what more, zombie, can a man be?
We may as well lay the whole world to rest, be silent in the universe, mindless.
Golem Symphony (2009)
You have given me
eyes to see
ears to listen
hands to do
and for these I am grateful.
You robbed the earth of me
to give me life
to make me sacred
and for that I am grateful.
You awoke me
with clay
with the Name
with the Word
and for all I am grateful.
You have given me
no mouth to speak
no heart to feel
no mind to think
and these I made myself.
And these I will not forgive you.
Werewolf Concerto (2009)
The moon hangs heavy
and bright, like a hole
cut through to the bleached morning sky.
My love, I love this moon
so much more (so sorry)
than I can love you.
In its light I am complete.
The sun, though lovely and warm,
pales in comparison,
gives me nothing.
You are my sun.
You are lovely and warm
and do not complete me.
Come into my arms, my darling.
I will ruin the sun for you.
I will wake you up,
pump your blood for the first time,
and we will howl at the dawn
as we lose the moon.
Vampire Minuet (2009)
Over the years
I have become refined.
I, once, decrepit and haggard,
searched endlessly for
the warmth of youth.
I was hypnotic but secluded,
monstrous and sublime.
Now I have grown.
My suits are fine,
my nails pared,
my teeth white and clean.
And I am getting better still.
Though I find myself
effeminate,
my beauty fits in
the brightness of the
day.
No one believes
in vampires anymore.
And that is what
I like to hear.
And take now the time to bury me in a shallow grave
that I may rise again.
Make me not claw my way upwards through six feet
of damp earth
because you are afraid of what I will be.
I will be.
Give to my dead eyes the last pleasure
of seeing this world
beyond my self.
Let me rise fragile and hungry
that you may better
take from me my unlife.
Allow me only to feel the sun once more
before returning me to the earth.
Do not be fooled by that which
walks in my body.
I will go.
We Reserve the Right to Remember Who We Are: Four Ghost Stories
Wrapping up ghost week, slightly belated, with
4: 50 Words on Hell
What is hell, I asked.
He said, I believe the Crusader kings stand outside the gates of Jerusalem forever, never going in, never able to make peace for what they did.
When we die, he said, when all our sins are counted, we will stand outside the gates of Srebrenica.
We Reserve the Right to Remember Who Are: Four Ghost Stories
--
3: Sleep
Sleep, sleep, I try to sleep.
I would not mind dreams, or bad dreams; dreams at all I would not mind. I would not mind a blank space in my mind, that held the place of dreams, while I slept. I would not mind blank space or dreams; I would not mind at all.
I do not have dreams, good or bad, or a blank space in my mind. For I, of course, do not sleep. I wake, and I wake, and I walk, and I wake in the world and I walk in the world. I do not sleep. I am like a god, an old, old god, cursed to wake through all the nights. I wake and live like a god, an old god, a mad god.
For when I try to sleep, I can’t. That is all. I can’t sleep. That is all.
Oh—but I lie. How I lie when I lie in bed and try to sleep. That is not all. There is more, much more, when I try to sleep. For there I lie, eyes shut, and then there I lie, eyes not shut.
For when I try to sleep, there is the trip-trap of some...thing, on the bridge. Trip, trap, through my mind. Trip and trap through the blank space in my mind and trip and trap through the dreams I do not have. Trip and trap and trip and trap and I will not sleep, I will not sleep.
What have I done—that you still trip and trap on the bridge?
So I try to sleep.
~*~*~*~
"Sleep" is monosyllabic! But only, if you'll notice, via cheating.
We Reserve the Right to Remember Who We Are: Four Ghost Stories
2: Moonwhite Tides
On their walk to work every morning, Bethany made Jackie stop at the gap in the boardwalk so she could stand on the beach. Some mornings they’d be a minute or three late, and the horn in the lighthouse would have already sounded, but Jackie had to wait for a few heartbeats while Bethany looked out at the lighthouse. Other mornings they’d wait, Bethany shifting uneasily on the soft sand until the horn had sounded and moaned away. They did not stop as they walked home. The horn didn’t sound then.
~*~*~
Bethany leaned her forehead against Jackie’s door, hammering slowly with her balled fist. “Jackiiiiie,” she groaned, her eyes shut against the morning. “It’s too early to be this late. Come on.”
There was scuffling, and Jackie opened the door in her bathrobe and the pink hippopotamus slippers Bethany had given her her last birthday. “Well,” Bethany said. “You look like the hot death.”
“Callin’ in sick,” Jackie grumbled. “Hanging out by my toilet this AM.”
“Oh gag, stop breathing on me,” Bethany said. “All right. Hydrate or something. I’ll try again tomorrow.”
“Yrrr,” Jackie said, and shut the door.
Bethany made the walk to the hotel alone. She arrived at the beach just as the horn in the lighthouse started to sound. She stood and listened, waiting for the sound to die away. Her eyes were fixed absently on the middle distance until a brief movement caught her eye. The lighthouse keeper? she wondered, scouring the smooth sides and small windows of the thing for the interloper. A seagull, she concluded as the cries of the birds clashed over the fading horn.
It took another moment, after the sound was completely washed away by the morning, for Bethany to realize that she had to go. Without Jackie’s presence behind her, without eyes pulling on her, the lighthouse seemed more important than the hotel today. But they were already a woman down, Bethany knew. Looking up to the windows one more time, Bethany pulled herself away, back onto the boardwalk, away from the lighthouse.
The next morning Bethany walked alone again. Jackie had the flu and would not be out of bed for the better part of the week, and again, today, Bethany could not feel a pull to walk away from the lighthouse. It was as if, without someone watching her, her behavior in the real world, the world where you have a job and you go to work so you can get paid and buy shoes, did not matter.
The next morning it was worse. More than simply feeling no reason to leave the lighthouse, Bethany felt herself wanting to go closer. To walk down to where the water lapped the sand. Absolutely not, she told herself, I’ll track sand all over the hotel, and who cleans that up but me?
By the next morning, it was more than an idle desire. Something inside her was more than pulling—it was keening within her, crying out for a closer glimpse of the lighthouse. How else can you know who’s inside? it begged of her. She walked into the wet sand at the line of the tide, and only by running and the good nature of her supervisor was she not late that morning.
And now, on Friday, Bethany stood, up to her knees in the cold waves, the white froth splashing up her blouse, into her eyes and mouth like tears.
There was a keening within her.
Not a thought even crossed her mind to look back. She waded as far as she could, and, just before her toes lost their hold on the shore, threw herself in. She was a fine swimmer, not exceptional, and her clothes weighed her down somewhat. She gasped at each swell, but like the job and the apartment behind her, it was as if her lungs had ceased to matter.
At least until she answered the question.
Who is up there—who is the lighthouse keeper—who sounds the horn?
Weak-limbed and trembling, she eventually managed to pull herself onto the rocky beach of the lighthouse. Stumbling over herself and coughing up water, she climbed the winding stairs until she reached the top room, where the lighthouse keeper sounded the horn every morning.
She opened the door, and no one was there.
Bethany shut the door behind her and took note of the control for the light, and the long chain that would sound the horn. There was a clock, ticking lightly, the only indication of what had to happen when.
She sat down in front of the horn, and waited, and understood.
~*~*~*~
By the time Jackie returned to work, Bethany had been missing for four days. They asked her, of course, since the two had been very close. Jackie told them Bethany had not mentioned anything to her. No, the last times they’d been together, Bethany’s routine had not changed.
After all, Jackie reasoned to herself later, they always stopped to look at the lighthouse. She suspected she knew exactly where Bethany was, even when the bloated body washed ashore, and every morning, on her way to work, she stopped to look at the lighthouse as the horn sounded, sure of who was looking back.
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