It’s a thing learned with fanfare, but more
often in silence. Sometimes appearing
is such hard work. Sometimes the will isn’t
there. Louis couldn’t muster it to disembark
a train in Paris. Glenn would not make it across
the channel to the same spot. Maybe the city
of lights made the brightness of being too
daunting, too impossible to close one’s eyes
and wish away. On a walk in southern
Vermont, Paula passed on the idea of anyone’s
gaze tracing her lips or cheeks or hips. And
the telegraph wires and the telephone lines
and the newsreels and papers did the best
they could to bring them back. Photographs
pled with the public to accept them as evidence,
to believe them to be the bloody sock, or shard
of bone, or clump of hair on a rocky jag. There
were recordings of the sounds they made
or recountings of the steps, the miles. Everyday
the vanishing grew and filled the mouths
of all who witnessed the new emptiness. But around
the corner, not far from the tracks, or in that alley
on which the sun always sets first, people disappear
more completely. Every inch of them rolls into shadow
until only hands, for a second, remain—one holding
the voice, the other gripping the name. And the world
wakes up short a ghost story someone somewhere desperately wanted
to tell.
from Poetry Northwest 12.1 Summer & Fall 2017More by John A. Nieves from the library
Copyright © John A. Nieves
Used with the permission of the author
on behalf of Poetry Northwest.