Hugo, Roethke, & Wright

November Poem a Day Challenge: Day 6


"Hardly a ghost left to talk with." Richard Hugo
 "What’s madness but nobility of soul / At odds with circumstance?" Theodore Roethke
 "I have wasted my life." James Wright

The silence is impossible,
always a rush of noise:
a train, leaf-rustle, thump
of heart, or house whisper.
Nothing stops the procession:
so much memory to alleviate
some choose liquid, pen, or pills.


Then there is the giving in:
dancing with the heavy bear,
is it time or is it spirit?
What was it the Greek said
about the river, always?
Never doubt the soaring chicken-
hawk nor the blessed ground.


For me its pictures, a line of
tinted bottles, foreground,
a haze that might be ghost-
flesh dancing just behind.
What is the strange reflection
in the glass? It could not be me,
not without a hand to chin, a tug.


Is it a waste to lay the day,
to look, to wake, to see?
Isn't it madness to doubt
your own devastation, all
the while courting the edge?
What the blood begs is not
silence, is it? Merely fluctuation.


When the three drunk ghosts visit,
never together, they speak, each
in a lonely room. One of cancer
stealing the cells, seven at a time.
Another swears sobriety: I'm dancing.
I've been dancing all this time.
The last one just sings: Kapowsin,


Kapowsin, sunfish, perch, & trout.
They are nothing if not gentlemen
ready for one last night at the fights
that will never come. Of course,
ghosts don't really wear flesh,
nor scuttle their way into pictures,
& best: they have no need of shaking hands.