OF SHADOWS AND MIRRORS

A ghost floats between my father’s ghost

and me. Haunt me if you want, history,

bough’s shadow looming through

my window and across my neck

where an umbilical cord had once claimed

each yet-born breath. When I die I’ll die

clutching final words on the final inhale. I think

if I don’t speak then maybe I won’t die.

I remember the last time I saw my father yellowed

and bejeweled with drug-rot and face craters

where skin tried to hide in skin. Even today,

the base of my family tree fumes alcohol

and smoke from still-hot circles

of crack pipes. My mother’s Caesarian

means she birthed me as tragedy hidden in bloody regalia,

royalty scared of choking on bark broken

from the husk of an addicted man. I love him

despite his struggle for home-coming, to have

a throne and not a grave that looks like lips

folding in when rain weakens the muddy perimeter.

The darkness to fear is not the darkness

earth makes of itself but what earth would tell us

if it parted those lips, emptied its sweet

sweet house. My grandfather salted every threshold

to keep evil from entering his house. I heard

that salt stinging an open wound means its cleaning

out demons, but maybe its crystal mirrors

are unwelcome, the body never wanting to see

its own inner ugly. Would that we could

make any pair of eyes see us new. Musicians

play for survival on every other corner

in the Delmar Loop. One man leans deep into

the chords, into the hollow where nylon stretches

to capture his sweat’s salt so nothing darker

than the pit of the guitar can get inside or get out.

In the pit of addiction my father was almost run down

by my mother on the south side of Chicago, genetic

near-blindness had him walking in the streets

with only his ears and feet to tell if a bus

would greet him before a Chevy’s grill. Was in

a bevy of reeds by a filthy lake on the west side

where I heard a whistle break from the stalks

and imagined a bodiless head calling for its body.

Why leave behind a head unless it’s always led to danger

or boredom, the advent of dark flirtation?

What else did my father hear in a speeding car’s

screech and horn? My mother barely recognized

the torn down man and he didn’t see her at all,

squinting between high and death. It’s death

that blinds with excess clarity, like seeing someone

stripped to his essentials, a tree minus nest or leaf.

Unburied bones critique the dusk, sharp as a branch

on a signless road. Where turn for the next

hunger? How long until these small mouths fill?