Casper  

Rebecca Reynolds

 

The ghost sleeps on the river, remembering pink skies,

a history one isn’t exactly invited to—

and those who have forced themselves into a language

unbeknownst to their "children’s children,"

who barely touch, in seedling gestures, the woods

that deepen inexplicably, e.g.,

my grandfather in the Black Forest and before the Manhattan Project,

close enough to his birth that the soul, or breath,

meets up with the good witch, who fixed his eye.

Except it wasn’t the Black Forest, but White Russia

and the neighbors may have been wending home to their lace and  potato dolls . . .

who will fly to their futures as if there were never a crossing

only how they do it remains a mystery. And here

you could just walk out from your despair, over the meadows

and back again, here in the new world, in our separate autumns,

always a ghost house with the somber screens and unbroomed walks

and the house’s motherly eaves, and the lights out.

We’re wishing for that cold and lonely dark

in the echo of our lunch bags, here in the unwild wilds

in the damp, blue October,

October of coral leaves and tragedies and the same operatic tracks—

to squeeze in through that burning,

the heart in the air, discernible.