Does the structure itself
present, evoke – create even
the image – the tool
of identifying the incarnate
feeling; made manifest in
aesthetic, in the representation:
A witch house

a house of seven gables
repainted black
(covering the Georgian wood)
the wood creaking
where someone’s life flickers
in and out of frame
in comprehension of the ghost
or in the quantum pulling
of time taffy
Were the ghosts they imagined
(400 years ago) us?
standing in a museum, looking
back at their lives in perpetuity –
gazing like wax figures at the
creatures of the near-far distant past

Was the wind they felt on the back of their
neck, not the past
but the ever-present future, staring
at a wooden beam, trying to
find them again

On the rocky shore, cast out upon the sea
or hollowed in a small cold room with
hungering, close ceilings
Ourselves, always reaching towards the ghosts
of our own mythology
the mythos we spin
around images
or the words that comprise the image
in the mind’s eye
of someone who can only look forward
out of two eyes
see a house painted black
see a stranger
and call it witch
call it ghost
call it
through time
with words
we invented
that precede us like ancestors
but that we pass down through the generations
Our own ghost transcription
of what it is to feel salt spray on the bare skin of your face
our own trailing chains and spells
cast endlessly
in circles that
paint the image backwards

and beautifully

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