Ghost Notes
Sometimes, on the other side of the earth,
where the road is a sword driven six months in,
and the lettings of the school dreep away
like rapids into the heavier water,
and the sharp shoulders of a chest of drawers
impose where a dog is not nudging for warmth,
the crackling of the traffic on the ice,
the potato-seller’s sad, piping call
through cavities in the gummy snowbanks,
and where the snow-bundled clouds, like buds
figuring out how to blossom, are backlit
like a throat clearing into no speech,
sometimes all this can filter into a bubble
stung in a glass of water, like the sigh
of the radio off by an apron-hung chair,
so the tick-tick twitch of the mantelpiece clock
ghosts the notes of her knitting, my mother there,
undemented, forming the comfort of a jumper,
as if that was the sole thing that mattered,
as if that could go on muffling everything else
but a snow-slit afternoon room in Japan,
as if it could – the point – at some point – click.