Cassie

[Ghost]

It is the third week and we have descended
to where vagrants sleep at the creekside;
(will you be there among them, dazed and dirty
with a low fever and strange thumbprints
pressed where the sun fades on your thighs?) Oh,
we hope, we peer, but there are only rags there
and emptied bottles, there are only forgotten
things that murmur in clouds of gnats and sudden light.

By day the dogs bay through blackberry
thickets and laurel hells; we search for you
in the low places, amid the broken glass
of lost rooms; the dumpsters are close-mouthed,
will not speak you, they echo, "clean",
"not here", "empty". The tenements are
littered with yellow ribbon, they rasp
and scuttle along the gutterstreams;
your mother sheds tears and hope
beneath a halo of moths caught blind
in the flashes of the press.

It is the fourth week and the newspapers say God
Weeps for you, for us. We have lost faith, we look
now in quieter places where a loose knit of bones might sleep,
where a child might close her eyes and become
again the dust of new stars, we weave through
the underbrush (long lines of calling)
and turn our ankles for you, bruise our shins
for you, hold our own close at night and think
of you, we dream your step among the mimosa
blooms, we dream you running to us: beggars'
lice and brownbrittle leaves tangled in your hair.

It is the fifth week and we find you.
Broken and cold in the attic crawlspace of your home,
paperwasps and writing-spiders have kept your secret
as the heat bled. There are flies, dry and silent,
in the webs, there are tufts of grey dust nested
in your eyes, there are long blue shadows
at your throat. None of us speak. Your mother
waits judgement under a suicide watch
in a sterile room where razorwire reflects the distant
shimmer of light you have become again.
The vagrants lay in a hum of wings and dreams,
their tatters pulled tight against what darkness lay
among the fires of their cardboard city.
The dogs sleep lightly, ever-listening for your footsteps.

Sometimes we yet dream you running,
running to us with moons and starlight,
with moons and starlight and night,
tangled in your hair.

[the mingo]

* *