Just as I was beginning to believe I was
in the clear, a tuning fork tone I typically associate
with tests for hearing loss séanced the ghost back.
It wasn’t my intention.

The ghost never took well to my outlining
of his habits. Out of spite
he asked So you’re a good man? I had
an answer I wasn’t too sure of.

The ghost figured extortion would draw me
out of this intestate home.
He said This is what the microphone picked up: pops of static,
I heard myself sobbing—a pine tree, shuddering laterally,

leaving behind its sketch in emerald
pollen grains, had willed the memory back
of noticing, one morning late
in our knowing, the minerals

your vulva left on my right thigh (stunned
at first by the vision
then the thud of the tree, I wondered if
anything else of the world broke).

On the ghost’s second try, a whir preceded
a reminiscent motion picture. And this
is what I’ll show everyone you know: There
I was, in color. There we were. But we hadn’t gone

left; this film had us going right:
Pablo Casals playing in the corner; late
phone sex (a dollar a minute); an entire neighborhood
watch; sky

blue; you sad; me sad; other
noises of adulthood; we held
tongues—analysts were in:
phenomena, they sought more of it;

life, not only within the year
but spilling on both ends; sidewalk-
chalk drawing, beyond the cracks, and the days
bleed out. More than we can

bear, at times but not always.
Had we gone left? O what could have been!
Like the child tumbling on purpose, hoping
the world watching would creak open for her.

Summer: parties. The trick behind
our party tricks. There still is time
to change. You didn’t
make your own face, did you?

So there you go.
The ghost threw his hands up, left
out the back door, his shadow doing something
similar but not quite one-to-one, as we like

to say. It’s easier isn’t it, when
it’s one-to-one? Easier
when there’s not much to it. You say something
and I say something back. Why,

you’ve been speculating an awful lot lately.
Asking how
we might find our way home
in this rain, and on our way there,

if we ought to ignore order
and save the screeching
hog behind the fence on Rue de l'Escalier;
if the painter who lived down the street

had said quaint instead of faint. There is a difference.
If the banker who lived next to the painter
had said sorrow instead of borrow—there,
a difference.

Like the difference between seeing
in the glaze of a china bowl,
in right light, a reflection
of a simpler you and not just a youthful you.