Ghost Moon
Shoe Fence in Rice, California
Light Enough
The Whispering
The Tarahumara
American River
The Trouble with Language in the Afterward
A Parting of Ways
Rag and Bones
Rapture in the Shadow of a Joshua Tree
Gathering in the Nowhere of America
The Afterward
Rejuvenating Light
Omega
I remember lifting Alexa
from her stroller so she could be
familiar with the night, and what
she said—Ghost moon.
Words diminish. They pass
into the language of the lost.
No more than the haunt
of knocks, shuffles, and moans
that children hear in a bedtime
story that tucks them in.
Now she’s staring
through a window at my bike,
scared a stranger, a ghost,
if you will, has stopped to wave.
Shoe Fence in Rice, California
Tongues, toes, heels, and arches—
no one on HWY 62 is wearing shoes.
Six marines who drowned in boot camp
perform a silent drill—a desert
mirage, something divine
in ragged blues.
The elder woman in the rear walks
toward the ocean in the west.
She carries corals from a dead sea.
In the afterward they will live like owls.
The chucking of all those shoes!
A schoolyard of children
on recess has skipped away
barefoot into the desert.
Every ghost town dive bar
was dead on the loneliest road
in America. With nowhere
to crash, I tucked into the draft
of a long-haul rig, now and then
swerving into the passing lane
so the trucker could see something.
Was it his fright that hit the brakes?
No matter. When I passed into the sleeper
of his rig, I found it packed with the comfort
of books, the internet, a clarinet with shiny keys.
Light enough to find a bed and pillow.
I made myself at home. I played a song
for the loneliest trucker in America.
Here in the redwood forest
owls swivel their heads,
they close their eyes,
and the last of moonlight
sifts through the absence
of my hands. They see
a story of once upon
a time and far away
a ghost bike leans
into the rigid uncertainty
of the Gateway Arch, and inside
the vault of St. Louis Basilica,
three austere women in robes
of Tiffany glass whisper let it be.
I am lost in the malady of America.
In every direction is a ghost town
without a way to get to even one
bar where ghosts waste their days.
Sometimes I think in the lost
of a dead-end road I should
lay my bike down and be
a spirit of rags and bones.
Until those who run fast flash by—
corredores kicking a wooden ball
dreaming of their homes in Mexico.
And the elder woman who carries
chunks of coral to the western sea.
They shimmer in the bleak of America.
As I crossed the Sierra Nevada,
the melting snow rushed in creeks
down mountains into the river—
a joyride of rapids to the almonds
and avocados of California.
In Sacramento, I passed a backpacker
who had gone missing all winter,
still wearing the death mask
of his brain freeze.
In Bodega, beneath the steeple
of her white church, Teresa of Ávila
revealed herself in a murmuration
of birds that led me to the brink
of America just down the road.
The Trouble with Language in the Afterward
I used to believe
words led to failure.
I’ll run a marathon, I’ll ride
my bicycle across America.
I’ll write something great
about forever. Empty
words. A bucket list
of one flop after another.
Until, in the dead start
of a syllable to say something
of no matter, the tongue
of my voice box swelled
with the numb, weary, uplifting
language of the afterward.
When I pulled her from the road,
all she wanted was to go back
to the long ago when she
played her flute. Tired of a life
of taking Elavil to slay the lovers
who never found her good enough,
she said, I want to be that girl
who gave music to the world.
That was the last I saw of her,
slipping away on her white bike,
the chrome of her flute shining.
I stood there, a parting of ways,
doubled over, like homelessness,
in the park with the morning paper.
A potter’s cemetery in NOLA.
Free plots, lest the digging.
Kinsfolk come in the spring
to upkeep the graves with PVC,
pieces of fence, astro turf—plastic
headstones with adhesive lettering.
The oak in the center with its
beads, teddy bears, and shells
is shelter from a storm that washes
soil down to its rags and bones.
A witch gathers some of them
for spells and magic in the afterward
and Buddy Bolden’s ghost cornet
howls more brightly than the wind.
Rapture in the Shadow of a Joshua Tree
I’m with my bicycle beneath a Joshua tree,
and I don’t know whether its shadow
is consolation or the shadow of a bird.
I think consolation because it sounds
like a bird telling me all will be well.
Like when I was a boy living on the river
—oak, moss heavy, shading the water—
the river was sky and the sky was river.
A turtle snapped from a log, and I
couldn’t tell whether it sank or rose.
In the canopy of the Joshua tree
there lives a boy by the river
and there’s a ladder of two by fours
for climbing up and down.
Gathering in the Nowhere of America
The good thing about biking alone
through the isolation of America
is the long ago comes back
like a slideshow of photographs.
The forest where I walked my dog.
Austere wheat and tumbleweed.
The dead bar of ghost margaritas.
Until you find yourself crossing
a bridge into the lingering of America
where everyone you thought you’d never see
again has gathered to welcome you home.
The faces of the six marines now with bodies.
Marantha with her flute. Rāfe with his French horn.
The children who went missing still without shoes.
A peloton of ghosts follows you
on the loneliest road in America.
They move like a cloud of moonshine.
They stare at you from the bittersweet.
See them in the haze of your afterward?
They morph into the owls of the western sea.
They’re staring at you, those tricksters.
Don’t let their jingle hoot distract you
from the onset of your revelation.
Do you find it lonely?
Because, like your heart, you’re lonely?
Just don’t sleep in the shadow
of a passing cloud. Be still. My heart
is buried next to yours. Hold me still.
Dark sky through the mesh
of your tent. Each pinpoint
ablaze with the afterward.
It flys from you faster
than the speed of light,
yet shines on you.
That’s why the world
is something rather than nothing,
though nothing is easier
than something, and why
a galactic astronomer,
having lost everything,
trains her eye on the rejuvenation
of a quenched void.
From the first word all I wanted
was to say something beautiful
like a child who points up in wonder
and names the moon Ghost Moon.
I wanted to convey a beautiful word,
a word that would ring like the bell
of the afterward. I’m sorry if all you heard
was the muffle of a deadbeat ghost.
So it goes. Sometimes failure is a warning
and when it clamors down a snowy mountain
it is already too late to escape the avalanche.
Somewhere from the rubble of language
will sound the word. It will ring in the voice box
of your rapture. Beautiful word. Godspeed.
Richard Long is Professor Emeritus of English at St. Louis Community College, now living in Santa Rosa, California. He is also the editor of 2River, quarterly publishing The 2River View and occasionally publishing individual authors in the 2River Chapbook Series. The 14 poems here are the fourth section (called "The Afterward") of his new manuscript Ghost Bike.
