All These Ghosts

by Silas House

Once, our desire so tremendous, we pulled the Vespa to the side of the road, slipped into leaf-light woods and tore at our clothes, ate each other’s lips like cherries, laid on the bare ground and once spent we saw the sky, alive and aching, stretched above us like an ocean.

One day I knew what the blues meant. The whole world shifted yet never righted. All things have a color and grief is blue. The ache you feel when you realize it will not fade, nor darken. Nothing lasts for me or for you. Not even the blues.

This is the curse of who we are as a people, always eating our own history, tasting the past.

I could plunge into the churning chaos where torrent met river, he grabbed hold of my hand. I was so electrified by his touch I didn’t think of how close I was to being swept away. Instead, I thought how a small moment of ecstasy is akin to drowning. He held on for a beat longer than necessary.

You can learn all you need to know about someone by watching how they treat small things.

Don’t judge. Think this: “There but for fortune go I” or “Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Forgive others. Forgive yourself.

Often, these days, I study on those who carry us. The everyday people who keep the engine of the world running. When the darkest skies move in, I remind myself that most people are good.

The burden of my empty arms is the greatest weight.

For My Dog I thought I might travel to the Amalfi Coast this summer but I prefer you, my little heating stove at my feet, to the warmth of a hundred Italian suns. I would rather feel the rise and fall of your breath beneath my hand than all the bobbing boats of Positano. What good is seeing the Pietà when I can watch you, watching me? The Trevi Fountain has nothing on our little spot down by our creek where you like to doze while I read.

I will carry you if needed, and when you want me to I will hush and be still. Sometimes it takes years to find ones who fit in their own skin. They let you be yourself.

You know yourself, so only be yourself and do not fret, for if more could be like you, they might be free themselves.

People have always been drawn to you the way they need to be near water, to wade in your kindness and wash in the calm tide. A river runs through you and it always has.

And when they saw him afar off, even before he came near unto them, they conspired against him to slay him. And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh. Genesis 37:18–19

Grief never goes away. It might change shape but it always has its teeth in you. —Allison Moorer

A darkness drops again, but now I know. —William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

And I think one reason that there may be some kind of feeling of wisdom being shared in some of these poems is that the current moment leads me to think a lot more about empathy, about how easy it actually is to be good to others, to just let people be. When writing lines like “Forgive others. Forgive yourself,” I’m writing that to myself as much as I am to readers. I’m not so much sharing wisdom as I am reminding myself that this is the best way to be.