There are new ghosts
in the Mississippi
and all day they play
unimaginable, underwatery
games with each other.
Come night, the moon
releases them, old and new,
from the grip of the river.
Then old drowned Sioux
and new suicides
chase weightless spirits
of black and brown bison
through our bedrooms.
Perhaps those who died
in what we understand
as accident do not realise
their conclusions. Every
night they waver through
small-town side-streets
back to the small taverns.
They stand impossibly still
with a twenty-dollar bill
dripping on the bar, wondering
why no one will serve them.
Among the living, few hear
this tired pounding on the bar
or those desperate whispers of theirs:
What did I do the last time I was here
which has me so now ignored?
Alley cats’ ears pitch up, vibrate
into double votives when the ghosts
float sobbing on by, lonely as water
in the beginning. In the beginning
there was a vast and formal formlessness,
then waters, rivers, ground
the formlessness down,
separated the dead
from the living.